Year: 2003

IT Productivity

McKinsey Quarterly writes about how companies can maximise their gains from their IT spends:

The first is to identify the productivity levers offering the greatest opportunity for competitive differentiation: Targeting the few specific levers that could well create a competitive advantage produces results more reliably than striving for improvement everywhere. The most promising IT initiatives usually evolve along with related business processes and build on an organization’s operational strengths. When taking this route, companies should beware the siren song of IT success stories from other industries, because the levers that matter in one sector may be irrelevant in another.

The second priority is to master the sequence and timing of investments. Many technology-based advantages, particularly those that don’t involve fundamental business changes, have a limited life because they diffuse rapidly through the sector. Timing is therefore critical if IT investments are to generate returns. Companies that get it right develop a clear understanding of how IT-enabled competition is evolving in their sectors. Investing ahead of the pack makes sense if the technology is hard to mimic, continues to yield benefits even if imitated, or offers great near-term value. Otherwise, companies can often hold down their spending and boost their returns by diving in only after others have made investments–and mistakes.

Customer-driven IT

News.com has an interview with David Moschella who says: “The main point is that IT market leadership is migrating away from its traditional focus on hardware and software products, and toward IT services. It is these services that will prove most beneficial to those companies trying to use technology to create important new value for their customers and/or industry. Implicit in this is a greatly increased emphasis upon so-called vertical (industry-specific) markets and solutions.”

He adds: “It would appear that this cooperative model will also play an important role in many of today’s customer-driven frontiers. Think about the cooperation needed for successful business exchanges, interoperable health care, effective copyright protection, and all manner of emerging industry-specific metadata and standards. The strong de facto leadership that has determined so much of the IT industry’s past is becoming steadily less important, although it will never fade away altogether. Once again, new cooperative entities are emerging. The control of these entities will be one of the great opportunities of the next few years.”

Security and Convenience

TheStreet.com writes that the “killer apps for investors will probably be software that enhances security and permits seamless roaming between all types of wired and unwired networks.” It builds on the WiFi theme, provide some ideas for solving the connectivity issues in rural areas:

Several well-financed start-up companies have already begun to sell advanced wi-fi transmitters, amplifiers and antennas that allow just about anyone to become a freelance telecom carrier by broadcasting a single broadband signal across a wide area.

The pioneer in this field is Glenn Wilson, president and founder of M33 Access in northern Michigan. Frustrated that none of the telecom carriers would bring high-speed Internet connections to the depressed countryside surrounding his hometown of Rose City, Wilson figured out how to buy a hodgepodge of parts from Florida-based online retailer HyperLink Technologies and rig up the country’s first renegade high-speed wireless ISP.

He now operates the largest consecutive wireless broadband grid in the country — about 100 square miles — with no telecom carrier involved, by beaming the signal from one self-rigged 200-foot-tall tower to the next. He sells wireless broadband to farmers, homes, school districts and small-business owners for as little as $25 a month (if you have a child in school, he’ll cut the price to $15). In a few weeks, Wilson plans to be able to add voice-over-Internet to his list of services, which will allow him to offer virtually free local and long-distance service at 4 cents a minute.

“Our company is about bringing Michigan out of Hooterville,” he says, referring to the ’60s-era TV show “Green Acres” in which communications was handled by tin can. “We’re causing the regional Bells some problems. We have 6,000 customers and they love us — no one is going to move in and take them away.”

Wilson uses Cisco routers at his head end and Orinoco-brand wi-fi radios made by Proxim; he runs the whole thing on Intel-based servers. But the whole operation, which obliterates the need for million-dollar switches made by old-school manufacturers like Lucent Technologies and Ciena, isn’t going to make equipment investors rich. The stuff is just too cheap, not to mention easy to upgrade and maintain.

The Cheap Revolution

Rich Karlgaard, writing in Forbes, asks what’s common with Google, China, India and WiFi? He labels it the “Cheap Revolution”. This is akin to UBS Warburg’s discussion about “cold technologies” recently.

Writes Karlgaard about WiFi: “France Telecom lost $23 billion in 2002. How? Like many other European state-owned telecoms, it had foolishly forked over billions for 3G wireless spectrum a few years ago. Whoops. Now comes dirt-cheap Wi-Fi and a host of other off-the-rack wireless wonders. It’s like the scruffy PC versus the minicomputer all over again.”

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Gyandoot

Gyandoot was launched in November 1999 as an intranet in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh connecting rural cybercafes catering to the everyday needs of the masses. It has been since extended to other districts in MP. It was awarded the Stockholm Challenge IT Award 2000 in the “Public Service and Democracy” category. Said the citation: “Project Gyandoot is a unique government to citizen Intranet project implemented in a tribal district (Dhar) in Central India, with numerous benefits to the region, including a people-based self-reliant sustainable strategy. Gyandoot is recognised as a breakthrough in e-government, demonstrating a paradigm shift which gives marginalised tribal citizens their first ever chance to access knowledge, with minimum investment.”

The Gyandoot website lists the services that are available:

Commodity/ Mandi Marketing Information System
Income Certificate
Domicile Certificate
Caste Certificate
Landholder’s passbook of land rights and loans Rural Hindi e-mail
Public Grievance Redressal
Forms of Various Government Schemes
Below Poverty Line Family List
Employment news
Rural matrimonial
Rural Market
Rural News Paper
Advisory module
E-education
Driving License
Khasra (Land Record) Nakal Avedan
Varmi Compost Khad Booking

A World Bank summary on the project explains the context and the approach:

The Dhar district in central India has a population of 1.7 million; 60% live below the poverty line. The goal of the Gyandoot project has been to establish community-owned, technologically innovative and sustainable information kiosks in a poverty-stricken, tribal dominated rural area of Madhya Pradesh. During the design phase of the project, meetings were held with villagers to gather their input. Among the concerns highlighted by villagers was the absence of information about prevailing agriculture produce auction centre rates. Consequently, farmers were unable to get the best price for their agricultural produce. Copies of land records also were difficult to obtain. A villager had to go out in search of the patwari (village functionary who maintains all land records), who often was difficult to get hold of as his duties include extensive travel. To file complaints or submit applications, people had to go to district headquarters (which could be 100 miles away), resulting in a loss of wages/earnings.

The Gyandoot project was launched on January 1, 2000 with the installation of a low cost rural Intranet covering 20 village information kiosks in five Blocks of the district. Later, 11 more kiosks were set up. Villages that function as Block headquarters or hold the weekly markets in tribal areas or are located on major roads (e.g., bus stops) were chosen for establishing the kiosks. Seven centers are located in towns (urban areas), 8 in large villages with a population of 5,000-6,000, another 7 in medium sized villages with a population of 1,000-4,000, and the rest are in small villages with population less than 500. Each kiosk caters to about 25 to 30 villages. The entire network of 31 kiosks covers 311 Panchayats (village committees), over 600 villages and a population of around half a million (nearly 50% of the entire district).

Kiosks have been established in the village Panchayat buildings. Information kiosks have dial-up connectivity through local exchanges on optical fibre or UHF links. The server hub is a Remote Access Server housed in the computer room in the District Panchayat.

User fees are charged at the kiosks for the services provided. Local rural youth act as entrepreneurs, running these information kiosks along commercial lines.

Rajesh Rajora was the Dhar district collector who initiated the Gyandoot project. His presentation in a TICAD workshop in July 2002 discusses Gyandoot and other ICT case studies from India. TIME magazine had a story on the project (June 4, 2001 issue).

A report by the Centre for Electric Governance at the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad discusses the project based on a filed study conducted in May 2002. Its conclusions:

As an experiment, the Gyandoot project can be considered path breaking. It attempted to use the ICT in improving the delivery of government services to the rural community. At the time of conceptualization, it was a unique idea, not tried by many in the world. The project was launched during the period when the entire world looked at the web-enabled solutions as a new opportunity of reaching customers directly and improving customer relations.

It is very clear that the power supply, connectivity, and backend support (with new value propositions) are the essential pre-requisites to benefit from such technological advancements. Several such projects in the enterprise sector have failed, resulting in the dot com burst simply because they could not provide cost effective, sustainable solutions with improved value to the customers.

In achieving its intended objects, however, Gyandoot cannot be considered a success. In spite of being in existence for more than two years, the usage of the system has remained far below acceptable levels. The current status of the project illustrates that ICT alone cannot improve the service delivery to rural poor. Significant re-engineering of backend processes and introduction of services that directly contribute to the poverty alleviation are needed to make such initiatives sustainable.

The study team would conclude this report by stating that Gyandoot should address the main objective of servicing the rural citizens through improvements of the back-end processes and involvement of dedicated government officials. Current ICT solutions are too costly for the level of usage being experienced. The challenge for the management of the Gyandoot system lies in enhancing the services to make the system cost effective, while benefiting the rural poor, without worsening the digital divide.

A discussion paper by Naveen Prakash has additional information.

Tomorrow: Bhoomi, eSeva and Information Village

Continue reading TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Gyandoot

Business Line Front Page

Our Rs 5,000 PC (5KPC) idea made it to the front page of Business Line, a story written by Chitra Phadnis and entitled “5K PC to bridge the digital divide”:

In two weeks’ time, the marketing strategy for a new PC, which costs a little over around Rs 5,000, should be ready.

Two companies – Via Technologies and NetCore (promoted by Mr Rajesh Jain of the India World fame) are jointly making this possible by bringing down prices of hardware and software respectively. The 5KPC, as Mr Jain calls it, is expected to revolutionise the usage of computers.

Today, price is the biggest factor hindering PC penetration, and the 5KPC, which is targeted at the mass market, should help bridge the digital divide, said the two companies. It is not a replacement for the desktop, so much as a device that will open up markets that did not exist till now, said Mr Jain.

The Via machine is a thin client, with a motherboard and processor but no hard disk or floppy drives. Marketed with a full OS – Netcore’s Emergic Freedom, based on Linux – it offers e-mail, browser, office suite, instant messenger and supports specialised Windows applications through add-on software.

“Several hundred” of these machines have already been sold in India, said Mr Ravi Pradhan, Country Manager – India, Via, at initial prices slightly over Rs 5,000.

Mr Pradhan, who exhibited the product in Bangalore recently, said that hardware costs had been beaten down by designing and manufacturing in Taiwan.

Profit margins for the distributors have been kept deliberately low and the company is betting on volumes for growth. A low-cost Via C3 CPU, compatible with Celeron and Pentium 3, has also helped reduce costs.

Software prices are lower, thanks to Netcore’s Linux-based Emergic Freedom operating system. Mr Jain calculates that the total spend on software could come down by 75 per cent.

The 5KPC works in a way similar to the cell phone or a television, coming “alive” only in the presence of a network. Users can simply log onto a network and start working. The server would provide the software applications.

An organisation or a small area (say a village), a single desktop would be the server and users with individual 5KPCs could connect to it. One hitch is that the users need to always stay connected to the network.

However, Mr Jain believes that the cable network and the emerging wireless connectivity (prices of which are expected to drop this year) could make this affordable.

The pluses are the TCO (total cost of ownership) comes down significantly. There is no need to upgrade software – one upgrade on the central server is enough. The hardware is low maintenance and there is no need to upgrade it at all. The Via and Netcore joint product is being seen as the computing platform for the “next 500 million consumers” in the world, offering the “other 90 per cent” a chance to use technology to improve their lives.

On a separate note, there is also a snippet about Netcore in today’s Economic Times. I couldn’t find a link online.

Feedster, Snarf and RSS2Mail

Some interesting developments on the RSS front.

Scott Johnson has launched Feedster, an RSS Search engine. It is a nice and simple idea, allowing one to get to a blog post. What is really needed is exactly that – the ability to go beyond RSS to search at the granularity of a blog post. Not all RSS feeds have the blog post in its entirety, but it should be possible to take a blog and decompose it into its posts, with help from the RSS feed.

SNARF! is a Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds.

For the past few days, I have been using an idea we have been developing internally – an RSS2Mail hosted service. Create an account on a central server (could also be on the LAN), which aggregates RSS feeds and distributes it via email in a separate IMAP account. Very simple to set-up and use, but it leverages the same email interface that we are so comfortable with – no need to run download a separate RSS Aggregator. Using this definitely increases the information (in this case, blog posts) that I can process by 10x – this is disruptive!

Social Network Analysis

Steven Johnson (author of Emergence) writes about new software which analyses the informal groups that permeate our personal and work lives. The beginning is fascinating:

In his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done as Vonnegut describes it, “a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.” A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a “false karass,” a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is “meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.”

No doubt you’ve experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another’s careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that.

One of the applications is in analysing emails to “create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups.”

We also need to think how we can use this to analyse blogs and get the clusters that (informal) bloggers are part of.

Social Entrepreneurship

NYTimes writes that “in increasing numbers, high-tech entrepreneurs who grew wealthy during the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s as well as many who didn’t are turning the intense business acumen they once devoted to making money to working for what they see as the global good…These New Age saviors are trying to build water purifiers, manual irrigation pumps, low-cost solar collectors, hearing aids, even highly durable mosquito nets. ”

One that I found interesting (from the point of view of Rural Markets) is “an Idealab venture, called Energy Innovations, which is making inexpensive solar collectors to sell in places needing cost-effective power.”

Web Server in RJ45 Connector

From Slashdot comes a link to the XPort by Lantronix, which “includes an 80186 controller, an OS, the TCP/IP stack, a 10/100 Ethernet transceiver, and the LAN interface magnetics.” The downside is that “the serial interface to the controller tops out at 300 kbps. ” The cost is USD 33 (in 10K quantities).

Am thinking if this can be used as a thin client.