Dana’s Always-On World

Dana Blankenhorn, the guru of Always-On, points to my Business Standard article and writes:

Good stuff. Some of his applications are a little silly — cricket scores sent to your cellphone. His business model, which he calls PubSubWeb (Publish, Subscribe, Web delivery) is too-much about delivering existing content rather than creating your own, organically, from within your life for my taste.

But he has the basics down. The basics are these:

– Ubiquitous wireless broadband
– Computing standards for applications
– Internet standards for transport

And there’s another important point here. If a Mumbai entrepreneur can come up with “Always-On,” (OK, he doesn’t capitalize it like I just did) then it’s not just Dana talking through his hat. It’s real.

This is the future. Get with it.

He adds in an email: “My work in ‘Always-On’ focuses on specific applications we can create with wireless broadband as the platform — medical applications, security applications, personal inventory applications, personal service applications. But the platform is the key. Once we have a modular, scalable platform, based on standards like IP and Linux, then we can build whatever we want on it…That could be cricket scores. I’m sure that’s important. But that could also be the monitoring of your heart, your blood, your blood sugar, analysis done on your home network, and the result being an alert to your doctor, your hospital or an ambulance before you have a heart attack, stroke or diabetic coma.”

Our contexts may be different but the end vision is the same. Considering the lack of legacy in India (and other emerging markets), I’d venture to say that we’ll get there first!

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Rajesh Jain

An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.