January 2003 – Emergic

Integrating Browser and News Reader

Says Dave Hyatt: “It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it’s posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.” [via Kevin Werbach]

Dave Hyatt is the lead developer of Safari (Apple’s newly released browser) and former lead developer of Chimera. He writes about the possibility of integrating features between the news reader and the browser. There are some very interesting comments. Padawanhas nicely summarised the agruments for and against the integration.

BlogStreet’s Future

Dana Blankenhorn has a comment about BlogStreet in a post entitled “Opportunity in Blogging Tech”:

Blogstreet measures the “success” of a blog by the number of other blogs with permanent link to it, called a “blogroll.”

This is really quite unfair.

There are other mechanisms that could be used. Total audience, easily obtained through site logs, could be used. But that is also unfair. Blogs run by major media organizations would dominate such rankings, and those are far from the most influential. Even blogrolling sounds good.

There’s another metric, that is the number of total links to a blog there are from other blogs. In particular these would include links to stories on other blogs. So-and-so said something Really Cool, with a link to it.

But even that is a trifle unfair. You may have one really good story, that a lot of blogs link to, and you may quickly fade out.

The best metric would combine all these — blogrolls, links and audience. The aim is to uncover influence.

Anyone care to put something together?

While blogroll analysis may not be the most ideal metric, it is definitely the best available at this point of time and that is what we have used. We do recognise its limitations – it is more of a Popularity index.

One of the things we’ve been working on over the past few days is on weighing the links that link to a blog. For example, a link from Scripting.com or Instapundit would be much more important than a link from say Emergic. So, just adding up the links may not be enough. Giving a weightage to the links is also important. We have done this and are calling this “Blog Importance Quotient” (BIQ). You should be able to see the results from this soon, and then decide for yourself.

Down the line, a question we have been asking ourselves is what do we want BlogStreet to become. Our answer: “a place to find experts” (expert bloggers, that is). My belief is that there will be two types of blogs: those by experts which will have high influence and reading (high in terms of traffic may be only a few hundred pageviews, but its the quality of traffic that matters here), and the others who have primarily their own small network of friends and family among the traffic.

The key in the blogging world is to establish via the blog a “sphere of influence”, where one’s opinion matters and is respected. These are the blogs (and people) one needs to find. And that is what BlogStreet shoud be able to enable. I should be able to type WiFi or Microcredit or Java, and it should point me to the bloggers who are “experts” in these areas.

From there, the rest of what BlogStreet offers will take over – showing me other interesting blogs (via the neighbourhood analysis and blogback). It is the first part that is missing and what we hope to work on in the coming weeks.

So, in essence, we want to make BlogStreet a window to the microcommunities that have begun to form around bloggers. For example, yeserday, I visited Dave Hyatt’s blog for the first time (floowing a link from Kevin Werbach’s blog), and found a wonderful discussion on browsers and news readers. I was amazed by the sheer number of comments that people had left behind. Dave has managed to pull in a community of techies interested in web browsers. This is because Dave is a “hub” – one who knows browsers better than most others. So, the next time, I am looking for ideas on browsers, his is the blog I should be visiting first. And that should happen as easily as typing “browsers” in BlogStreet.

SPOT and FM

From San Jose Mercury News on how used FM for its new smart personal object technology (SPOT): “When Microsoft researchers wanted to know how to bring the Internet to everyday devices like the wristwatch, they turned to the sleepy technology of FM radio. It turned out that the trick to making a smart electronic watch was to put in a radio that could pull bits of data out of the same radio waves carrying Muzak into malls and elevators.”

The impact:

SPOT watches promise to offer users personal data, like the local weather, wherever they are, custom-tailored news headlines, stock prices from the user’s portfolio, personal calendar data and scores for the user’s favorite sports teams.

This type of data could liberate bored employees stuck in meetings, or tell you that you’ve got only 20 minutes to make it to the airport and that traffic is bad on your usual route.

Microsoft found a way to personalize the watches: giving each a unique identification number. The user goes to a Web site and enters the watch number and types preferences into a template. Then, as the watch is receiving the DirectBand signals, it looks only for data associated with the ID number. Hence, your watch only stores data on the sports teams you like and discards the rest.

And because the watch knows which radio station it is receiving the information from, it can use that knowledge to reset itself. For instance, if you travel to Dallas, the watch will pick up signals from the Dallas radio station and reset itself for the appropriate time zone. It can also reset itself with the precision of an atomic clock.

Hosted Software Vendors

InfoWorld gives the world a new 3-letter word: HSV, replacing the much-maligned ASP. It writes: “With enterprises looking for low-cost, low-risk solutions in a tight budget environment, HSVs have started to gain more traction in areas ranging from CRM to human resources. And though they are strapped for cash and staff, just like nearly every other company, HSVs are continuing to push the technology limits of delivering software as a hosted service.”

One of the key challenges faced is cutomisation.

A key objection to hosted software has been HSVs’ inability to customize their wares to the same extent as packaged-application vendors do theirs. So HSVs are working hard to increase customizability while maintaining the cost-effectiveness of a single multitenant code base. “The new model is customization through configuration, says David Thomas, CEO of Intacct in Los Gatos, Calif. You have to design [hosted applications] so they can do extensive customization through configuration, and thats a challenge.

Everybody’s sharing the application, so you cant customize the code, says Employease’s Alberg.

He explains that instead of using programming languages and tools for customization, the best hosted applications use built-in wizards, drop-down lists, and radio buttons. There are an unlimited number of custom data elements you can add, and no software development or database knowledge [is required],” he says.

Separating business rules from the applications base code is also key to “configurable customization,” allowing customers to define and select permissions, role-based usage, approvals processes, and best practices from menus within the system. Finally, customers typically want access to their data via whatever third-party analytics packages they may be using, and this requires a stateless architecture that assures that intensive queries cant adversely affect database performance for any other customer.

These are points we need to keep in mind for building out our enterprise eBusiness suite.

TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: 10 Ideas to Tap Invisible Markets

Lets see how we can the 10 ideas outlined by Vijay Mahajan, Marcos V. Pratini De Moraes and Jerry Wind in their paper (Marketing Management, Winter 2000) on The Invisible Global Markets in the context of building our Rs 5,000 PC (5KPC) ecosystem

1. Build products to compete against bullock carts rather than automobiles: The competition for the 5KPC is not necessarily the 20KPC. Rather, it is nonconsumption, or in the case of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the paper-pen approach to writing letters and doing accounts. In schools and colleges, a handful of computers (if present at all) are shared by dozens of students in that case, the computer is not a personal computer, it is more like a TV. By bringing the cost down, we can now create individualised access to the computers, thus making for a learning experience (as compared to a viewing one earlier).

2. Create product and service revolutions that can be exported: India can be the first market, the laboratory for implementing these 5KPC ideas. But that is not the only market. The opportunity lies in replicating these ideas across other markets like India. The language requirements may be different, but the same desires and needs for a connected computer exists across the countries at the bottom of the pyramid.

3. Pay attention to the informal economy: Most of our life is spent in cities. Our friends and family live in cities. Semi-urban areas or the rural villages are alien to us. But these are the places where the next set of opportunities lie. They are not what we come across in our daily life we have to go our of our way to tap into this other economy. Their problems are different for example, uninterrupted electrical supply which we take for granted is a dream for most people outside the major metros in India. This means to make a computer work, we need an alternate and cost-effective power supply.

4. Use global family networks: India has its Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), China has its Overseas Chinese. Can they be persuaded to partake (for profit) in the computing buildout? For example, can NRIs get together and provide Rs 150,000 (USD 3,000) to put together a 10-computer lab for the village/school that was part of their childhood? This microfinance can, in a distributed manner, complement the resources that are available via NGOs and the government.

5. Understand that customers dont know how to be customers: According to me, one of the reasons (besides price) for the poor off-take of computers in the emerging markets is that people and enterprises still dont know what to do with them besides the regular email, browsing and Office applications. Whats needed is the creation of application bundles relevant for different verticals, and appropriate training for end-users on how to make the best use of the computers. A community portal where the users can share experiences and ask questions about computing without being embarrassed about their ignorance would also be very helpful.

Monday: 10 Ideas to Tap Invisible Markets (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: 10 Ideas to Tap Invisible Markets

Netcore Plans

Over the past month or so, we’ve been brainstorming on how we (as a company) grow, and what areas we focus on. Two things have been very clear: first, the messaging business (which accounts for all our revenues currently) has become increasingly commoditised and while our customers are increasing (we have 180+ corporates), revenues per customers are falling. So we cannot necessarily rely on messaging to provide our entire bread-and-butter business.

Second, Emergic Freedom (the thin client-thick server solution) business will take time to build. This is our bet on a big upside in the years to come, but given that we have to build out new markets and target nonconsumption (of computing), the gestation period is not going to be small. We know the segments we need to focus on: schools, colleges, government, bank branches, telecentres (cybercafes), SMEs and homes. The long-term future of the solution is great, but I cannot tell which will be the near-term market successes. In the coming months, we need to get reference installations in as many of these verticals as possible.

So, given this dichotomy, we need to create a revenue stream which can ensure we are breakeven/profitable in the coming months, until the time that Emergic Freedom starts kicking in with the revenues. I hate losing money and have always believed that both making profits and losses can be habit-forming. Better to develop some good habits!

The area we have identified is what I call “Information Work and Collaboration”. Its about providing our existing (and growing) corporate base with cost-effective knowledge management solutions based around blogging. We’ve been doing a lot of work around this (Digital Dashboard, for example) over the past many months. We now have a set of products which can help enterprises better manage their knowledge base – the unstructured information not in databases. This also builds on the messaging base, and works as a bridge on what we want to do in the future – offer an integrated eBusiness suite for SMEs.

The set of products that we will be marketing in India (and then to other emerging markets) are:

– Traction. We’ve been using Traction internally for the past few months and its been a great platform for managing tacit knowledge. We will also set up a hosted service for community blogs.

– News Aggregator, Reader and Digital Dashboard. This suite, which we have developed internally, lets users in the enterprise subscribe to RSS feeds, and get alerts on their Dashboard in a browser. I believe RSS is a “disruptive” force in getting information delivered to you. The same concept can be extended later to enterprise events. As users get these feeds, they can post items to their blog using Traction.

– Events Builder. This too has been developed internally. It lets users define event streams from any ODBC-complait development, and generates an RSS feed which can be picked up by a News Aggregator.

So, all the three ideas are built around RSS and events. The Events Builder helps generate RSS from existing databases, the News Aggregator-Reader and Dashboard takes the RSS feeds and delivers them to the user, and Traction helps the users add comments and post the items (along with emails, etc.) to a personal, group or project blog within the enterprise. The hosted Traction service lets users work in ad hoc groups across locations or enterprises.

I think the set of ideas make sense. They can be used independently or together. They leverage on the base of messaging which is now existent in enterprises. Knowledge management systems today are very expensive. What we have is something which can get them started quickly and intuitively, without making large investments or changing user behaviour.

The News Aggregator also leverages the work we have been doing in BlogStreet. Besides identifying the top blogs and neighbourhoods of blogs (and we have now information on over 50,000 blogs), we also know about 5,000 RSS feeds from these blogs. Taken together, BlogStreet’s base can be a good starting point to expose enterprises to blogs and getting them started on blogging, as the first step en route to building a knowledge base internally.

So, the two themes that we will focus on in the coming months are Accessibility and Affordability. Messaging, the Knowledge Management suite and BlogStreet focus on Accessibility to information and people. Emergic Freedom emphasises on Affordability of computing.

They are two different tracks with different market segments. One will help us take care of our near-term growth, while the other is our long-term bet. As I’ve said often, small companies have to ensure both long-term growth and short-term survival. We need to ensure cash comes in every month, even as we make bets on some big future opportunities.

The past few months have been exciting. We’ve opened up many fronts for Emergic Freedom and a clearer and realistic picture of where the opportunities lie, and at the same time came up with a plan leveraging all the R&D we have been doing in the past to get our customers on the path to becoming “real-time enterprises” with a set of cutting-edge ideas and software.

Lindows does DVD and Music

From News.com: “Idot, a small PC maker specializing in direct online sales, will sell a Lindows Media Computer model that incorporates some home entertainment functions such as DVD and digital music playback. The company plans to begin selling the PCs early next month, with prices starting at $330 without a monitor…The Idot PCs are based on budget processors from Via Technologies and are similar to low-cost Lindows PCs sold by Wal-Mart, with the addition of a DVD drive and accompanying software. Lindows uses software maker Elegent’s etDVD program to enable DVD playback.”

Continue reading Lindows does DVD and Music

It’s an Analog World

Excerpts from an interview with National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla:

It’s fine to do zeros and ones for spreadsheets, and that’s why the PC uses the least amount of analog. But we’re not doing spreadsheets anymore. We’re doing digital photography. We’re downloading images and graphics from the Internet, and we’re doing more and more stuff wirelessly. All of that is analog.

At Berkeley they are looking at a 10 gigabit-per-second radio with an onboard variable length inductor that can change its personality. You walk into the red carpet room at the airport and your PDA or your personal computer starts sniffing the air to see if there is a 2G, or a 2.5G, or 802.11b network. It covers the spectrum and it picks the cheapest path to the IP backbone and configures itself to be that radio. Let’s say you’re doing something that’s voice intensive. It will still keep sniffing to see if another protocol gets introduced that is even cheaper.

Web Services for Software Integration

From News.com, which says that web services is “work in progress”:

Today, Web services has begun to find a home as a much-needed technology that allows systems from different companies to communicate and work together, regardless of age or origin. This software “integration,” as it is known in the industry, has become especially valuable for the many businesses that need to connect internal systems. Now, many of those same firms see Web services as an easy way to link systems between companies, in the area of business-to-business e-commerce.

The routine business of exchanging data between partners and corporate departments may not sound as interesting as the consumer applications originally touted for Web services, but it’s a business nonetheless.

Most initial Web services projects focus on exchanging information between internal systems.

TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: The Markets

The Rs 5,000 PC (5KPC) is the anchor for taking computing to the next 500 million users. These are markets which are as yet invisible. The technology vendors have not tapped these users in the past two decades, because, among other things, the price-points have been too high. The existing value chain created by the likes of Intel and Microsoft is not geared to tap these next users and make a profit. Whether they will do so in the future is a matter of conjecture. But what this does do is open up an opportunity for the creating of a new value chain, a new ecosystem built around the 5KPC.

Which are these markets? Think of the worlds emerging markets countries like India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia. Then think of the schools and colleges, the government offices, the small- and medium-enterprises, the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector branches, the homes, and the telecentres in these countries. These are what constitute the bottom of the pyramid. The limited adoption of technology has hampered their integration into the worlds economic system. This is where access to computing can make a big difference by making them more productive, their work and businesses more efficient, the children and students smarter and much more aware of the wide world outside. In essence, computing can be the passport to a better quality of life in the coming years for these nonconsumers.

These markets are what Vijay Mahajan, Marcos V. Pratini De Moraes and Jerry Wind call the Invisible Global Markets. They state that developed markets with a GDP of more than USD 10,000 constitute only 14% of the worlds population. Companies focusing on these markets do not see the other 86%. Among the strategies that they outline in their paper (Marketing Management, Winter 2000) are:

1. Build products to compete against bullock carts rather than automobiles
2. Create product and service revolutions that can be exported
3. Pay attention to the informal economy
4. Use global family networks
5. Understand that customers dont know how to be customers
6. Recognise that low income doesnt mean low quality expectations
7. Use demand pooling to reach critical mass
8. Bring your own infrastructure
9. Rethink the entire marketing and business strategy
10. Bridge the digital divide

(The most recent issue of The Smart Manager has an adapted version of the same set of ideas by Vijay Mahajan.)

In tomorrows column, well take a look at each of these ten ideas and apply them in our context to see what we can learn. And we can contemplate how to target this next (or rest) 86% of the world, it would be useful to keep the following comments by the authors in mind:

Customers in these invisible markets stretch out like countless grains of sand on the beach. Individually, they may represent a very small opportunity. Because of their sheer number, however, this forgottem 86% of the world represents a huge opportunity. Companies that see these opportunities will find creative ways to gather these grains together to build castles.

You cannot wait for these customers to appear on your radar screen. You have to go and find them. You need to move off the beaten path both in the products you develop and the creative strategies you use to turn these invisible markets into visible returns.

Tomorrow: 10 Ideas to Tap Invisible Markets

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: The Markets