Day: June 14, 2005

Business World has an article by Sanjay Anandaram of JumpStartUp, a VC firm. Entitled “The Choking of Innovation”, Sanjay says: “India’s much-vaunted IT industry has to change dramatically to maintain its leadership. A fundamental re-think of the business has to occur.”

For one, the next 10 years for the industry will not be anything like the first 10 years. Increased globalisation, increased choices for employees and customers, and increased competition will force big changes. The industry has grown admirably over the past decade and a half and has attracted the attention of the world. That means Indian IT services now have to contend with brutal global competition and market demands.

Indian IT services companies are prisoners of their own success. Enjoying unprecedented market capitalisations thanks to terrific earnings growth, they find it hard to make investments with unsure time horizons and pay-offs. Investments will dent their earnings and affect stock prices. Investments to explore new business models, partnerships, undertake M&A transactions of any significance, hire globally, do research, and create organisational change are sure to impact near-term earnings. But what of the serious possibility of an adverse impact on business in a few years if these investments are not made now?

Instead of investing their cash surpluses in long-term investments, Indian companies tend to reward their shareholders with hefty, tax-free dividend payouts (thereby enjoying shareholder loyalty) and perform treasury management functions by investing the money in safe mutual funds. Clearly, these companies are signalling that they have no other productive or imaginative use for this capital (e.g. investing in long-term competence and capability development) than paying dividends. The management’s conservativeness is reinforced by the pressure of maintaining quarterly earnings.

It is disheartening from an industry standpoint to see hundreds of millions of dollars simply lying on the balance sheet and not being invested in creating innovative competitive advantages for the future. It is disheartening to see companies lack the confidence to take big, bold steps, even after 20 successful years in the global arena. The ability to dream big on a global level and then take the required steps to realise the dreams is what will distinguish the true global players from the also-rans in the next 10 years.

Mindsets need to change dramatically, especially among leadership levels. From managing status quos to managing risks, from managing people to managing businesses and leveraging opportunities, from managing Indians to managing a diverse global workforce, from a ‘span of control’ to a ‘span of competencies’ – all these initiatives are essential for success. Career paths for R&D and industry experts, for example, need to be made as attractive as jobs that are oriented to people management. An entrepreneurial environment and mindset has to be put in place.

SiliconBeat writes:

When BJ Fogg was head of U.S. research at Casio in the late 1990s, he wanted to use a technology commonly used for speed reading to deliver content to watches and other devices.

Casio never embraced the idea. But Fogg is getting a second chance. Now director of research and design at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, Fogg is leading a research team that is testing the same technology – known as RSVP – to easily present large amounts of text on tiny mobile phone screens.

This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. His researchers have an entrepreneurial hunger, Fogg says. The lab’s created a public service called BuddyBuzz that anyone with the right mobile phone can use. And the team is studying the commercial feasibility of the technology.

“We think there’s definitely commercial potential for delivering text content to mobile phones and we’re exploring some of those options,” he said. “There are members of the team who would love to spin this out to a company.”

But first, more about the technology.

Even with newer mobile de�vices with larger screens, the amount of text that can be displayed at any one time is limited, forcing people to scroll or tab from paragraph to paragraph or page to page.

BuddyBuzz’s technology largely avoids those issues. RSVP – for rapid serial visual presentation – quickly flashes words on a screen one at a time. The streaming process lets you stare at the screen and just absorb the text, without having to shift your eyes back and forth. The technology also allows the typeface size of text to be larger because just word at a time is on the screen.

Russell Beattie writes:

The idea can be summed up in a phrase: “What’s Notes is New Again.” Right now blog tools allow you to create a “post” which is usually comprised of just a few fields: title, content, date, and maybe categories or tags. I’ve seen some other fields like media links as Enclosures (essential for podcasting), geotags for location, and there’s been a sputtering effort to add in the iCal namespace for calendaring, but all these seem to be in separate worlds. In other words, you’d have a feed that’s generally one thing or another, and not really combined into one thing. What I’m thinking about is a way of looking at “posts” or in RSS nomenclature: “items” as containers for arbitrary data in labeled fields, in a way that can be easily extended and re-used. Sort of like a “note” in Lotus Notes.

Imagine in your aggregator you could receive not only “Posts” but forms as well. And calendaring info, and images, etc. And this stuff wasn’t just HTML formatted inside the Description tag, but actually processable by the aggregator itself. I guess then the Aggregator becomes a Universal Data Reading Client instead. On the other side of the equasion, I currently have a weblog which has only one way to create new items, a button called “New Post” which has just two fields, Title and Content. Now what would happen if I added more ways to create items: “New Calendar Item” and “New Review” and “New Classified”, etc. Each one of these extra types of posts would all have Title and Content, but they’d also have fields filled with additional arbitrary information which was included in the RSS also. If your aggregator didn’t understand these fields, they could just display them.

So how do the aggregators “know” how to process the fields? Well, they don’t automagically – the developer of the aggregator will decide to support some sorts of fields and just display the others. I can imagine some systems building a plug-in architecture which could read the various Fieldsets, but in general we’d all probably just do our best. Sort of how aggregators work right now.