Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

There are three obvious and two not-so-obvious things which need to be done to get the Internet business growing again. The obvious ones: Reasonable, flat-priced (unlimited use) broadband needs to grow. I think the pricing sweet spot is somewhere around Rs 250 for unlimited use for 512 Kbps-1 Mbps connectivity. Actually, the last-mile conenctivity quality [...]

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A week or so ago, I met a couple of VC friends and we got talking about the Internet business in India. My contention was that this is perhaps a great time to build a hybrid net-mobile consumer media business — if one is willing to invest $5+ million over the next 2-3 years, and [...]

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This was the column that began my Tech Talk columns in November 2000. It was a vision to get India to 100 million Internet users in 3 years. Ten years later, we are still at only half that number. This is what I wrote then:  There are 5 components to building a mass market Internet [...]

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This week’s links: On Education: Two interesting posts by Koshy and Atanu. Four Pillars of an Open Civic System: by John Geraci. “What we really want (or what I really want anyway) is not simply government transparency, but an open civic system – a civic system that operates, and flourishes, as a fully open system, [...]

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I will remember this London vacation for the time I spent with Abhishek.On work days now, I hardly get to see him since he tends to sleep by 8 pm. In London, it was just him and me for the most part during the day. We would walk together for long stretches, travel on trains [...]

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Food was one of our concerns given that we eat only Jain food (no onions and garlic) and in Bhavana’s case no potatoes either. On the first day, we ate lunch and dinner at Govinda’s (near the ISKCON temple) on Soho Street. The food was excellent. Dinner for the next three days was with friends [...]

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I had thought of going to some of the historical destinations in London, but decided to leave it for another time when Abhishek is a little older and better able to appreciate their significance. Bhavana had seen most of these places during her previous visit (while I had done my business meetings).What we did do [...]

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We all had our own shopping agendas – for Bhavana, it was looking for something different and buying gifts for the extended family, for Abhishek, it was toys and more specifically cars (Hamley’s or Imli’s as he initially called it), and for me, it was books. And we found it all in the Oxford-Regent Street [...]

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This was my third visit to London. I first visited London with my parents and sister as a 14-year-old as part of an SOTC package tour to Europe. The second visit was about 7-8 years to attend a Development conference organised as part of a UN body. This third one was a five-day vacation with [...]

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This one was one of my early Tech Talks (from 2001), and one that I enjoyed writing a lot. It was about the lessons one could learn from watching the movie “Lagaan.” I wrote it on 5 parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. An excerpt: Lagaan is about people. Ordinary, [...]

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This week’s links: How the Web Changed the Economics of News: by Paul Bradshaw The Impending Demise of the University: by Don Tapscott. “The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that [...]

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During my London trip, there were two questions that I started thinking over. Why is it that only some countries built out empires? In this context, why did India not go outward and build out an empire? The answer matters now because I see a similar story playing out in the global business space. A [...]

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I will write about my London vacation next week. I wanted to first share the joy of not taking a flight out of India in the middle of the night! We took the 12:55 pm Jet Airways flight to London. For the first time ever, I did not end up being groggy eyed by the [...]

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Opposition Party Role: Credible and Substantive Finally, the BJP has to accept its role as the leading Opposition Party in India for the next five years. There are three things that the party can do which can help it win back the confidence of voters who were disappointed with some of the party’s antics during [...]

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Organisation (continued) With this background, how is it that the BJP can create a process by which it can keep winning – and winning. Here are the elements that it needs to create: On-Ground Presence: BJP needs to create Constituency-level teams that keeps working through the years, builds database of people (supporters, undecideds, etc.), and [...]

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Organisation: Efficient and National With clarity of Ideology and a decisive Leader in place, half the battle will have been won for the BJP. The next step has to be start rebuilding the party organisation based on merit and morality. It also needs to expand its footprint nationally, especially in the four states of Tamil [...]

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An excerpt from my Knowledge@Wharton interview in October 2006: Given the way that mobile phones have taken off in India during the past four to five years, I am convinced that more people in India will access the Internet through mobile phones than through computers linked to narrowband or broadband connections. We need to start [...]

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This week’s links: Megastudy: Bill Gurley writes about an interesting South Korean online education company. How IBM Plans to Win Jeopardy!: from Technology Review. “IBM’s Watson will showcase the latest tricks in natural-language processing.” Building the Smart Grid: from The Economist. “By promoting the adoption of renewable-energy technology, a smart grid would be good for [...]

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Leadership (continued) Lest this be misunderstood, I am not asking for an authoritarian leader. I am asking for a Strong leader. And there is a difference. Strong leadership does not mean authoritarian leadership. I am asking for someone who can go out there and make the tough decisions that are needed. Someone who listens and [...]

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Leadership: Decisive and Dynamic The BJP and RSS have to first stop living in denial. There needs to be an acceptance that there is a deep set of problems that need fixing.  This election was not one where the BJP “lost just 20-odd seats.” It has to be seen from the point that the victor [...]

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