Month: April 2012

I spoke on April 14 at Columbia’s India Business Conference. My topic was “Transforming India.” Here is the audio of the 15-minute talk I gave:

Last year, I announced the winners of the contest and published their entries on the blog. This is what I wrote in the preamble:

I am more than convinced that India needs big ideas and dramatic transformation going ahead, and it is our generation that has to help in that process. We have to pick one of the two national parties, and participate in the system. The 2014 elections will come at a critical time for India’s future. We have three years of groundwork that can be done in creating awareness and driving action in the chosen areas of our specialisation to bring good ideas to life.

This week’s links:

• Marc Andreessen Interview: from Wired. “Technology has been just a slice of the economy. We’ve been making the building blocks to get us to today, when technology is poised to remake the whole economy.”
• The Creative Monopoly: by David Brooks. “Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.”
• The third industrial revolution: from The Economist. “The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too.”
• Chinese lessons for India: by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint. “The data shows that the difference between growth rates in the two countries converge towards the end of every decade, but then something happens that allows China to accelerate relative to India all over again.”
• McKinsey’s 2001 India report: Still very much relevant. A set of key initiatives to remove hurdles for growth.  Also see Mint’s 2009 National Agenda series. We need to wake up to reforms NOW!

The overall DEMO experience was very good. Two days of packed presentations and lots to think about. The startup ecosystem in the US is throbbing. The billion-dollar Instagram acquisition by Facebook will add more fodder.

India needs a few such big deals to make the whole ecosystem come alive. There are many companies being started, but with early stage investment still not that easy to come by, it does become difficult for companies to breakout from the pack. There will be some stupid ideas, there will be failures. But that is part of the learning and growing up process. Out of these ideas will emerge some big winners.

I am sure it will happen. But we also need to work on putting many other elements of the ecosystem in place – the connecting to academia, incubators, DEMO-like events, mentoring, and so on. In DEMO this year, there are quite a few companies from outside the US (Israel, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea), but not one from India. (There was one Bangalore-based company that had relocated to the US.) Hopefully, it will be different a year from now.

The DEMO Winners (“DEMO Gods”) were TourWrist (panaromic photos), ZBoard (battery-powered skateboards), Voxeet (high-quality conference calling), VisApp (home design visualizer tool) and Jumala (DIY3D Game creation). Details are at Venturebeat. Here is what it had to say on two of the winners:

Virtual panorama photography app TourWrist gave the DEMO audience a sneak peek of two new features due out in May. First are PanoSpots, which link multiple panoramas together Google Street View-style, and give them more depth by linking to photos, videos, brands, audio, websites, and Facebook profiles. The real fun demonstration was of the trippy planar acceleration controls, which will allow you to physically step forward or back while holding up an iOS device to move between panoramas, go through doors, and check out other linked panoramas or information.

Voxeet is a startup attempting to bring radical transformation to the infuriating space of conference calling. The company focuses first on crystal-clear conversations, where you always understand perfectly who is talking and what’s being said. It accomplishes this through an app — for Windows PCs and Android phones, for now, but later for iOS devices and Mac PCs. The app provides greater clarity through sophisticated audio processing and also lets you manage your call and the people in it through an attractive visual interface.

The 70-odd companies were put into 5 buckets – mobile, enterprise, cloud, media and social, and consumer. It was quite a thrilling experience to sit through and listen to so many new ideas in one go. Some ideas caught my attention. A few others had me thinking no way could that be a company! It was a bag packed with surprises at every turn.

What I was struck was with the diversity of the ideas. Some seemed way too futuristic, some seemed to hark back to the late 1990s with a “social” or “cloud” word thrown in there. At first, I would question the logic. But then, I figured that this is now innovation works. The good and bad mix together, and things move forward. It is hard to pick winners, but I am sure some will become big in the months to come. Instagram’s billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook was a recurring theme – and perhaps an aspirational dream for many.

In addition, DEMO had about 10 90-second pitches from their startup weekend and another competition. These were young kids barely out of college being given an opportunity to quickly talk about their idea. It was a wonderful platform for them, and perhaps, some of them will be back in a year with 6-minute pitches.

The format of the conference is very interesting. Companies are given 6 minutes to do their pitch. Given, as we are, to long-winded presentations, 6 minutes probably sounds too little, and almost impossible! I remember having done a pitch at PC Forum for Novatium about 6 years ago. I was given 2 minutes, and it took an extraordinary amount of preparation to get it right.

After having listened to more than 70 6-minute pitches, I can say that the time is absolutely right! If it is planned, 6 minutes is a lot of time to get across the concept and a product demonstration. It is enough to create intrigue in the audience – or they could just as well ignore it and move on the new one.

DEMO also had some 1:1 conversations with industry experts (15 minutes), which gave a more high-level perspective on the key verticals. After every bunch of company presentations, there was a “Sage Panel” consisting  primarily of VCs who would quick dissect the pitches they heard, providing a sort-of instant feedback to the companies.

Every once in a while, I like attending a tech conference to get a flavor of what’s coming. Typically, I prefer the US because I find the conferences much better organised and much more at the heart of innovation of new ideas. I had attended Government 2.0 about 18 months ago, and before that it was Web 2.0 over 3 years ago. So, this time around, since I was going to be in New York for my talk at Columbia University, I looked around for tech conferences and sure enough, I found DEMO was there the following week in Santa Clara. And so, I signed up.

Until a few years ago, DEMO was pretty much the only place where startups could launch themselves in front of an inviting audience. Now, such opportunities have proliferated – with TechCruch, Y Combinator and some others offering similar platforms. For me, since it was the only choice, I figured that it would be a good way to get a glimpse into what’s coming in the near future.

New tehcnologies and ideas have always fascinated me. But of late, as I have gotten more deeply immersed into Netcore, some of that scanning and experimenting has taken a back seat. In the tech world, you almost have to reboot yourself every few years. And so, here I was at DEMO!

I had a run a contest last year:

India needs big ideas if we are to create a rich, developed nation in the next 20-30 years. We are not getting these at the national level. In the political skirmishes between the various parties and their leaders, what has been left behind is an agenda of transformation.

In every sector of India’s economy, there is a need for big, bold and imaginative ideas to fast-track economic growth and development. We cannot have another generation hobbled by illiteracy, malnourishment, poverty and a limited education.

For the most part, we in Middle India have stayed away from the discourse of policy-making, leaving it to the so-called experts, politicians and bureaucrats. It cannot stay that way – for the future that is impacted is ours and that of our children. We need to participate in the process if we are to contribute towards changing the course of India’s future.

Over the course of the next couple weeks or so, we will take 10-odd areas where India needs big ideas, and open it up to contributions by all. Each weekday, I will outline one area and put forth a brief backgrounder on the need for change. You can then put forth your ideas on what needs to be done.

This week’s links:

• A New Paradigm for Startups Needed: from The Atlantic. “Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this “ecosystem” or that “ecosystem.”
• Rebuilding RIM: by Michael Mace. Good ideas for any turnaround. “We can’t predict what will happen to RIM, but we can talk about what the company needs to do to survive.  If nothing else it’s an interesting case study for anyone who needs to turn around a tech company.”
• The Intention Economy: a free chapter from Doc Searls’ new book. “Once customers’ expressions of  intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase. The result we will call the Intention Economy.”
• The USA’s Spy Centre: from Wired. “Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.” India’s government too must be thinking along similar lines.
• India’s economic reforms: from The Economist. “…Rather than waste time celebrating his work of two decades ago, everyone pushed on with far more urgent business: trying to get India’s prime minister to understand that, without a second round of economic reforms, and soon, India’s economic prospects will look far grimmer in the next few years than they have recently.”