Emergic: Rajesh Jain’s Blog

As part of the investments I have in about a dozen (mostly early-stage) companies, I have to attend some of their Board meetings. They give me a good opportunity to catch up with what’s happening (though I do talk to or email many of the CEOs every so often). And as much, I think the […]

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I will be on as a “High Order Bit” on November 5 (Wed) afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit. Here’s what I’d like to talk/discuss in my 15 minutes:

how the digital infra in emerging markets is different from the developed markets,and why I believe the next generation of innovations can come out of countries like […]

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After we launched MyToday in October 2006, we grew slowly for the first couple of months. We had started with CRICKET, but then launched some more SMS channels. I remember a picnic we had gone on New Year’s Eve and us celebrating the 10K unique subscriber figure. All growth was happening word-of-mouth. We had done […]

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Continuing with the thinking around the decision to launch free SMS subscription services in October 2006, it seemed such an obvious decision to make given what has happening. But there is always legacy that one has to deal with. In my case, the legacy was wanting to focus on the mobile Internet — I always […]

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In the coming days, I will share our experience in building MyToday and the decisions we made at some of the challenging moments in the business. We haven’t got everything right, but when I look back at the past two years, we definitely made more right decisions than wrong ones. And in a growing business, […]

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“Hot, Flat and Crowded” is the title of Thomas Friedman’s new book which was published a couple weeks ago. I bought a copy last Sunday at one of the local bookstores and have just started reading it. The first chapter reminds me of a lot of what we need to do in India — Nation-building. […]

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Over the past month, I have given four talks and have listened to many panel discussions. Here are a few suggestions to speakers:

Respect the time limits that have been sent. This is not as easy as it sounds. Given a microphone and the opportunity to make points, we all tend to go somewhat haywire. And […]

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I bought an iPod Touch on my recent visit to the US — only for trying out the AppStore. I could have re-hacked my existing iPhone but there’s always a risk with the process going wrong and me ending up with a brick. Or, I could have bought the Rs 31,000 iPhone 3G in India. […]

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I am giving a keynote at the Indian Magazine Congress event later today - on how mobiles can make a difference.  Here is the talk and the accompanying presentation.

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I watched “Batman: The Dark Knight” on IMAX during my US trip. I had finished off my meetings and work for the day, and so decided to take a few hours off and check out the movie (had not seen it in India). The IMAX experience is quite amazing indeed. There are some scenes which […]

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