Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

The IT and telecom industry has seen then creation and growth of two large industry segments in the past 15-20 years. The first has been in IT and business process outsourcing. The second has been in the mobile space, with the creation of an industry that now generates over $20 billion (Rs 100,000 crore) in [...]

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This is excerpted from an article I wrote four years ago: If broadband has to boom in India, the computing industry will need two innovations to reinvent both its architecture and business model. After all, what will people do with fat pipes without affordable and manageable access devices and a variety of services for users [...]

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This week’s links: A Manifesto for Slow Communication: by John Freeman (in The Wall Street Journal).  “Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these [...]

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Our goal this year is to consolidate the enterprise business streams so we can create a foundation that can grow 75-100% year-on-year. This business generates ideas, revenues, customer relationships and profits. In parallel, we are also building out the consumer business – something we had slowed down over the past year. This is something that [...]

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Over the past few months, I have also started doing what I should have done a year or two ago – going out and meeting customers. If there is one learning that I have from the past couple years, it is that customer interaction should not be delegated to the sales team only. While building [...]

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To ramp up revenues, we pushed harder on the enterprise messaging services in both mailing and mobility. There was a lot of interest for our high-volume mailing product, and made sure our sales team pushed that harder, given that we had some unique technology advantages. On the enterprise mobility side, we created a separate team [...]

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It was then that we made a decision to focus on bringing the business to cash profitability in a year or so. This meant that we would have to bring down expenses and work harder to grow the existing revenue streams faster. It would also mean eschewing newer ideas to bring a stronger focus on [...]

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Running a business is exciting and challenging at the same time.  There are many decisions one has to make and live with the consequences if they turn out to be wrong. In the past year or so, we at NetCore have faced many such decision points. I want to share some of these  moments and [...]

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I wrote this about a year ago: What will be the dominant model on the mobile? What will create the $30 billion global market opportunity in the next five years? …On the mobile, VAS 1.0 was all about generating revenues from consumers. In India, this is a billion dollar business. VAS 2.0 will be using [...]

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This week’s links: Game Theory and Politics: from the New York Times Sunday Magazine, about Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Real-time Distribution: An essay by JohnBorthwick (via Michaela). “Over the past year there has been a rapid shift in social distribution online.    I believe this evolution represents an important change in how people find and use things [...]

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The Digital Services Operator idea has been something I have talked about on many occasions in the past. (I used to call it the VAS Operator.) It basically combines three things – a direct-to-consumer reach on the mobile and Internet, a payment/billing relationship which creates a cash balance, and an open publishing platform for services [...]

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This business group currently has two elements: MyToday SMS and Profiled Database Push. MyToday SMS comprises the 40-odd channels that we run, which offer free daily updates ranging from news, cricket and stock market, to astrology, health tips, a new word a day, jokes, and more. This service has grown to over 4 million subscribers [...]

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As part of Enterprise Messaging Services in NetCore, we focus on two areas: Mailing and Mobility. Both deal with two forms of messages which are integral to our life – email and SMS. In Mailing, we have a number of products and services for enterprises: Emergic MailServ: Linux-based mail server Emergic CleanMail: Cloud-based Anti-virus, Anti-spam [...]

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I have been running NetCore Solutions for more than a decade. For the period from 2000 to early 2005, it was a place where I could experiment with new ideas (Thin Client-Thick Server as a software solution, Visual Biz-ic as building blocks for enterprise software, Pragatee as an all-in-one business server for small businesses, Digital [...]

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In November, it will be 10 years since I sold my Internet portals business to Sify. It has been a long journey. Even as I have spent a significant time in NetCore, I have made about 15 investments in early-stage companies as part of what I call the Emergic Ecosystem. One of the disappointments at [...]

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This is what I wrote two years ago: Here are three things I’d like to do in the rest of my life and which will require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not about philanthropy, but about building the right systems and foundation – in a sort-of self-generating way. Ideally, the Indian [...]

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This week’s links: Gov 2.0: by Tim O’Reilly. “With the proliferation of issues and not enough resources to address them all, many government leaders recognize the opportunities inherent in harnessing a highly motivated and diverse population not just to help them get elected, but to help them do a better job.” $100B US Market for [...]

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As I look ahead to the 43rd year of my life, there are many things I would like to make happen. I don’t know how successful I will be, but it is important to have some goals. NetCore’s foundation needs to be strengthened, so we can grow revenues at 100% or more each year for [...]

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As I look back over the past year, some memories stand out. The talk I gave at the November Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. Even though I said all that needed to be said, I realised later that I had substituted passion in speech with completeness of words. I will not do that again. [...]

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The third pillar of this year has been my son, Abhishek, who turned four in April. This is the year when our interactions matured and we started having plenty of conversations about lots of different topics. Sometime in the past few months, he opened up as a person, and began talking a lot. The London [...]

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