March 2003 – Emergic

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Vision

Let us start by outlining our vision for the solution that we want to offer at the village-level from the viewpoints of the four stakeholders: the villagers, the village administration, the district administration and rural marketing organisations.

Today, the village is singularly isolated. It is not part of a larger community. Its interaction with the external world is quite limited. In a sense, it is an idyllic world, unspoilt by modernity. Yes, villages can now watch TV, talk on phones, and get newspapers and magazines. But by and large, the village voice is silent, except when it comes to the ballot box. What is needed is an interactive solution, with the villagers having a say in what they do and how they grow.

What is needed is for the village and its people to have greater access to new opportunities. Even as the nation moves ahead, the village for the most part has remained an island of its own. This is what has to change. The village needs to become a self-sustaining unit, and at the same time integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. The underlying idea is to use the solution to put more power and responsibility into the hands of the local community at the village, by providing them with the right technology and information they need to make decisions.

From a villagers point of view, this is what he would like to see:

A connected computer which provides access to computing resources and the Internet.
A programme to ensure that he and his family can be made literate and e-literate. At the minimum, there should be at least one person in the family who knows English and can use a computer.
An email ID, ensuring that he can be reached electronically.
Storage Space for keeping electronic copies of key official documents (eg. land records, certificates) and other information (eg. medical records).
Access to various eServices for government interactions from accessing information to doing transactions. This should be combined with service-level guarantees from the government departments.
Computer-enabled education for his children in schools, so they are comfortable with technology from an early age.
Access to electronic markets where he can sell his products directly without being dependent on middlemen who take away much of the profit.
Programmes to upgrade his and his familys skillsets, so they can become better at what they are doing and learn new skills.
Protection of data, so that unauthorised access does not happen.
All of this to be available for a monthly basic fee of no more than Rs 20 per family.

Tomorrow: Village Vision (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Vision

Self-Assembling Networks

Emergence at work. Reports TRN:

Drawing heavily on the chemistry of biology, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany have devised a way for electronic agents to efficiently assemble a network without having to rely on a central plan.

The researchers modeled their idea on the methods of insects and other lifeforms whose communications lack central planning, but who manage to form networks when individuals secrete and respond to chemical trails.

The researchers found that what works for ants and bacteria also works for autonomous pieces of computer code. “The idea is inspired by chemotactic models of tracking trail formation widely found in insects, bacteria, [and] slime molds,” said Frank Schweitzer, an associate professor at Humboldt University and a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems (FHG-AIS) in Germany.

The work could eventually be used for self-assembling circuits, groups of coordinated robots and adaptive cancer treatments, according to Schweitzer.

Insect, bacteria and slime mold communities coordinate growth processes based on interactions among chemical trails left behind by individuals. The researchers set up a similar network using a computer simulation of electronic agents moving randomly across a grid containing unconnected network nodes.

– Slashdot thread

Top Strategic Technologies

InfoWorld writes about a Gartner report, mentioning some of the top strategic technologies: Enterprise IM, RFID, Network Security Platforms, Grid Computing, Web Services, Location-based Services, Speech Recognition, Real-Time Enterprise Technology, IP Telephony, and Tablet PCs.

Macromedia Central

An interesting product, which is “designed to extend Macromedia Flash beyond the browser.” Writes MacWorld:

Applications designed to work with Macromedia Central can be used to “grab” online info and make it available for examination and manipulation on the desktop when you’re offline. If you’re interacting with an application running inside Central and go offline, when you return online the info that you’ve worked with on your desktop will be automatically synchronized with the online (if it’s interactive data).

Adds InfoWorld: “The Flash applications detect when the user is online and can automatically connect to download weather reports, movie listings and recipes, for example. Applications can also be linked, allowing a user to, for example, move a recipe from a cooking site to a grocery store Flash application and order the ingredients.”

Knowing What To Do

The Basex TechWatch newsletter provides a summary of the week’s events. Every so often, they have a good commentary. This week, its by Steven Friedman (I couldn’t find a link to it online.)

Everyone has his own system for managing tasks or to-do items. Some rely on memory, some use e-mail, some use a big list, some have a personal assistant. But no KM package I know of handles the to-do problem
adequately. Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, for example, include to-do functions but they are widely under-used. Why has to-do functionality consistently failed? How can we make our to-do management more efficient?

The very nature of the to-do problem makes it particularly hard to formalize to-do lists in a KM environment: how we go about choosing the tasks we do and the order in which we do them is a very personal matter. Compound with this the fact that many feel that their memory is much better than it actually is. And remember that to-do functionality inherently suffers from an acute case of feature-creep (for each item, we want to categorize and add in lots of other information, but the more
buttons included, the less likely users are to use it for the small stuff). We now have a KM market that is waiting to be conquered.

The integration of to-do lists within Groove Networks’ eponymous peer-to-peer software is precisely what makes Groove such an intriguing product with much potential; it seems as though it was designed specifically to tackle the to-do problem. Groove’s basic insight is that knowledge workers often organize themselves through e-mail, and that such organization can otherwise be formalized in a smart collaborative environment. Groove – with a good amount of success – turns actions into parts of a project and workflow, and allows users to jot down quick notes, all through a slick user interface, thus going a long way towards solving
the to-do list problem. It replaces the tendency to use e-mail as a to-do
list with actual project management. And other vendors, such as Team Direction, have add-ons to Groove that make it even more useful as a collaborative to-do list.

But the problem isn’t only technological. One of the most successful techniques for managing and improving your to-do efficiency is by writing down everything you have to do, from the smallest possible item (“respond
to John’s e-mail”) to the largest – and to cross-out, but not delete, items from the list once you complete them. The useful technique of recording even the smallest items, together with the psychological reinforcement of leaving a big visible list of how much has been accomplished, helps people improve their own task management skills. No productivity tool exists in a
vacuum.

I fall in the category of people who tend to write down things in my (paper) notebook. Of course, its a list which grows and grows and grows….!

Information Tsunami

David Kirkpatrick, reporting from PC forum, says: “As the data problems get more complicated, so do the solutions. More and more, businesspeople will have to become conversant in software issues if they’re going to run an effective enterprise. If we don’t keep inventing, and companies don’t keep buying, we will all drown in the oncoming tsunami of information.”

I think the time has come to see how to build out the Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush. Blogs, RSS, Outlines, Links are the ingredients. Steven Johnson has been writing about this [1 2 3].

Its something I’ve been thinking about as the next big leap for BlogStreet. More on this soon.

Cheaper Monitors Needed

Slashdot has a discussion on an IDC report “claiming that revenues for LCDs by the end of this year will top the CRT revenues.”

In emerging markets like India, what is needed are not necessarily better displays but cheaper ones. As we work on the Rs 5,000 (USD 100) PC, the monitor cost is becoming a big issue. In India, it is now hard to find 14-inch monitors. One is being asked to buy 15-inch monitors for a few hundred rupees more. In a few months, it will be 17-inch monitors for another few hundred rupees more. The trend is exactly the opposite of what we want!

Perhaps, the focus should now be on sourcing older monitors which have a long lifetime. I just wonder why Samsung or their ilk cannot make real cheap 14-inch monitors. Is it a technology issue or just a desire for forcing price increases in a commoditised market?

Business Process Management

William Gurley writes:

The Deming revolution–built around concepts like continuous improvement and just-in-time (JIT) inventory–had a universal impact on global manufacturing. Today, there is a new form of enterprise software that has the ability to do for white-collar business processes what Deming did for manufacturing. Delphi Group believes that business process management (BPM) is “quickly emerging as the moniker for the next killer app in enterprise software.” Believe it or not, this may actually undersell the potential impact of BPM. BPM will not just change the software industry–it will change industry in general. Just like Deming.

What type of enterprise software could possibly have such an impact? BPM is a new programming paradigm for the enterprise that leverages browser-based applications, e-mail, global connectivity and enterprise application integration (EAI) infrastructure to deliver a powerful, business-focused programming solution. A mix between workflow, EAI and application development, BPM makes it easy for companies to codify their current processes, automate their execution, monitor their current performance and make on-the-fly changes to improve the current processes.

Here is how it works. Business analysts work alongside IT staff and create a graphical flow chart of targeted processes within the organization. These graphical designs are typically done in an integrated design environment (IDE) and represent the different events, decisions and actions that are performed by employees as well as the flows of data that are necessary to perform each task. Once defined, people begin to interact with the new application. New “processes” are started by an individual (for example, entering a new customer issue) or as the result of an event (for example, a customer account goes past due). Actions are then passed from person to person through the concept of a task inbox, and typically the passing of a URL.

Gurley describes the six components of a BPM solution: IDE, Process Engine, User Directory, Workflow, Reporting/Process Monitoring and Integration.

I was just having an internal discussion yesterday about the need of the equivalent of a “Sim City” for an enterprise – a framework for a manager to create a virtual model of an enterprise, and then inject a series of events into it. This will let the manager check the software that is about to be deployed and get a feel for the information flow and the reports that are likely to be available, prior to deployment.

The BPM article captures the essence of what I’d like to see as part of our eBusiness suite targeted at SMEs that we are developing.

WiFi Hotspots

Coming soon to the air around you – wireless Internet access, according to the Economist, stating that “Wi-Fi is now moving from the realm of grassroots enthusiasts to that of the big computing and telecoms companies.” A summary of the recent action:

Toshiba and Accenture have announced plans to set up 10,000 hotspots in America. Cometa, a joint venture between Intel, IBM, AT&T and others, has already said it will build 20,000. A consortium of five Asian telecoms firms plans to build 20,000 hotspots across Asia by the end of the year, and similar moves are afoot in Europe. An hour’s free Wi-Fi access is being thrown in with every meal at a handful of McDonald’s hamburger restaurants.

Biotech Survey

The Economist has a survey on biotechnology, stating “It promises much: more and better drugs; medical treatment tailored to the individual patient’s biological make-up; new crops; new industrial processes; even, whisper it gently, new humans. A few of those promises have been delivered already. Many have not. Some may never be. Some may raise too many objections…But the field is still in its infancy, and commercialising the edge of scientific research is a hazardous business.”

Biotechnology, along with infotech and nantech, are the areas of today and tomorrow.