April 2004 – Page 4

Marketing for Start-ups

Steve Neiderhauser has suggestions on why and how engineers should interact with customers:

Heres a couple ideas you may find yourself using during lunch and learn sessions.

Tell a demonstration story: In The Story Factor, author Annette Simmons tells us that a demo story is the next best thing to an actual demonstration. She writes about a trainer at a gym who has a tough product to sell: exercise. If everyone listened to facts, wouldnt our nation be in better physical shape? Instead of facts, the trainer tells a playful story to show the benefits of exercise. Story is a pull strategy that works.

Combine visual with metaphor: Gerald Zaltman, author of How Customers Think, refers to research indicating that the use of metaphor together with visual imagery lies at the heart of all major advances in science. He suggests listening to your customers to determine what metaphors they use for your product.

During your presentation, use the pull of visual and metaphor to describe the benefits of your product. Not only will your customers remember your product (metaphor is at the core of memory), your engineers will likely start to think visually and create edges for your products.

What do I think of engineers talking with customers? Im glad you asked. How could they not talk with your customers? If you allow narrow thinking to limit your employees, wouldnt that create a danger for your company–and a life-threating environment for start-ups? For narrow thinking is a broken-winged bird that cant fly past the first round of financing.

How is this possible? In Seth Godins latest book, Free Prize Inside, he tells us that everyone works in marketing (yes, even engineers); that making your product remarkable causes customers to remark to others about your company.

Apple and Steve Jobs

NYTimes has a profile:

In just two and a half years, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has managed to take a well-designed hand-held gadget, add software connecting it to Macintoshes and Windows-based personal computers and convince the recording industry that he has found an elegant solution for ending its nightmare of digital piracy. In doing so, he has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous – hip, even lovable computers – to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life.

With roots both in Silicon Valley’s digital culture and the 1960’s counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from “Pattern Recognition,” one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

And, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. “He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era,” said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.

The iPod’s success is also the clearest indication that Mr. Jobs, if he is to successfully revamp Apple, will ultimately win not by taking on PC rivals directly, but by changing the rules of the game.

The Apple that is starting to emerge may be a harbinger. The company’s growth may no longer be defined by its PC market share, now a declining sliver of the PC industry, but instead by Mr. Jobs’s ability to create consumer markets.

Mr. Jobs, who says he has a 70 percent share of the market for legal music downloads and a 45 percent share of the MP3 market, sees the shift as sweet vindication. “We’re getting a chance to see what Apple engineering and Apple design can really do once we get out from underneath the 5 percent Macintosh operating system share,” he said.

for the first time the number of Macintosh computers it sold (749,000). At the same time, revenue for products other than Macintoshes reached 39 percent of the total of $1.91 billion for the quarter, more than double the percentage two years ago.

In creating the iPod, the iTunes Macintosh and Windows software and the iTunes music store, Apple has not just designed products; it has also designed a business system. That may help explain why, almost three years into Mr. Jobs’s foray into digital music, his major competitors are still playing catch-up, or, as in the case of Hewlett-Packard and Time Warner, have decided to ally with him.

Warren Buffett and Beyond

Barron’s looks at Berkshire Hathway and likely successor to the “Great One”:

Berkshire’s Class A shares have broken out of a three-year trading range and fetch $93,000, up 10% for the year to date. The company’s business prospects look better than ever. Operating earnings, a record $3,531 per share in 2003, could approach $4,000 in 2004. Book value may exceed $55,000 per share by year end. And Berkshire is sitting atop $31 billion of cash, a reflection of Buffett’s reluctance to make major new investments.

Yet also on the minds of many attendees will be a less uplifting subject — the issue of succession. Buffett, who turns 74 in August, probably is the toughest act to follow in American business, due to his extraordinary talent and legendary success. He commands a company with $64 billion of annual revenue and $142 billion of market value, whose shares have risen 5,000-fold since he took control of what was then an ailing textile firm in 1965.

It is entirely possible Buffett still will be running Berkshire a decade from now. But in the event life has other plans, he is leaving less and less to chance. In this year’s shareholder letter Buffett wrote more about the succession issue than he has in the past, noting the “primary job” of the company’s board of directors “is to select my successor, either upon my death or disability, or when I begin to lose my marbles.” He added that the 11-member board continues to evaluate the “strengths and weaknesses of the four internal candidates to replace me.”

Who are these four candidates? The odds are Berkshire Hathaway’s next chief executive will be one of five top company executives: Joe Brandon, CEO of General Re, the largest insurance division within Berkshire; Ajit Jain, head of Berkshire’s lucrative specialty reinsurance operations; Tony Nicely, CEO of Geico, Berkshire’s fast-growing auto insurance division; Rich Santulli, CEO of NetJets, the leading provider of fractional ownership in corporate jets, and David Sokol, the CEO of MidAmerican Energy, an Iowa-based utility and the largest noninsurance division within Berkshire.

Metaweb

[via Prakash Swaminathan] Nova Spivack has a nice post on what he calls as the Metaweb – the web which connects Intelligence (also see the graphic):

The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a Web focused on relationships between things — what I call “The Relationship Web” or the “Relationship Revolution.”

We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the “arcs” will begin to rival that of the “nodes” that make up the network.

This is similar to the human brain — individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of “spreading activation” to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links.

As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind — the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a “bunch of interacting parts” to “a new higher-order whole” in its own right — a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.

I think of this as the Memex.

TECH TALK: Letter to Arun Shourie

I was recently in Bangalore at IIIT-B at the invitation of Prof. Sadagopan to make a presentation to Mr Arun Shourie, Minister of IT and Telecom (and Disinvestment). Prof. Sadagopan had aggregated 14 companies to make 10-minute presentations as part of a session called Jewels of IT. Due to an unexpected development, Mr Shourie couldnt make it, but the session went ahead as scheduled a recording was sent to Mr Shourie.

As part of my talk, I was planning to also make suggestions on what India needs to do in IT and Telecom. Since Mr Shourie was not physically present and in the interest of time, I skipped that segment of my talk, and thought why not elaborate on it and make it into a Tech Talk series. (I dont know if Mr Shourie will read it, but those fortunate enough to know him could perhaps email him a link!)

Before I start my letter, a little about the person. Here is a profile of
Shourie. I remember reading his articles, editorials and exposes in the Indian Express in the early 1980s. He topped a recent Economic Times poll of CEOs of the most admired politicians. The paper wrote:

While most people are surprised at the ease with which Shourie has made the transition from being a journalist to an economic policy maker, they should not be. This Stephanian is one of the most qualified politicians in the business, with a PhD in economics (not a an honorary one but one he burnt the midnight oil for) from Syracuse University .

He briefly worked with the Tata group for a period of three months before joining the World Banks young Professionals Programme in 1966. He then served as an economist with the World Bank for over a decade (1967-78) and during that stint he worked as a consultant to the Indian Planning Commission.

And while Shourie may have traded in the pen that inked many a expose, he continues to be a firebrand, speaking out fearlessly against all that he perceives as wrong. Shouries professionalism can be seen in the speech he made while accepting the ET Business Leader of the year 2002:

Everyone in society should be accountable. I believe theres much more accountability in business than in public life. When things go wrong in business, people have to answer, but politicians get away with it. And often persons in public life become immune to scandals. The man may be soft spoken but there is no mistaking the steely edge to his voice.

The Economist recently wrote about Arun Shourie:

[Shourie] boasts of a tenacity nurtured in his days as a crusading editor of a newspaper known for its dogged pursuit of scandals. I am a graduate of the Indian Express; we exhaust the other fellows. Victims of this persistence include not just civil servants and judges, but politicians. After about 20 parliamentary debates on privatisation in the past four years, the most recent were adjourned for want of a quorum.

As this implies, Mr Shourie sees the politicians themselves as obstacles to getting things done. The quality of many who people our public lifethat is not democracy, it is disarray, it is free-fall. Yet he refuses to use India’s democratic system as an excuse for the country’s painfully slow pace of economic progress over the past 20 years compared with China. Governance, he argues, is not golf: that we are a democracy does not entitle us to a handicap.

Tomorrow: Letter to Arun Shourie (continued)

Business Week on Google

As Google readies for a possible IPO which could value the company at between USD 20-25 billion and raise USD 1-2 billion in the coming week, Business Week has a cover story which discusses “why the world’s hottest tech company will struggle to keep its edge”:

Google’s payday arrives just as the search phenom faces a withering battery of tests. The company’s spectacular success has lured brawny competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo! Inc. into the arena. Those companies view search as a command center of the Internet, and they plan to wrest it from the upstart in Mountain View, Calif. The result will be a battle for the heart of the Net — one just as momentous as the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape Communications that took place a decade ago. Says Roger McNamee, managing partner at venture capitalist Silver Lake Partners, which has no stake in Google: “Search is the key to the kingdom.”

And the battle is raging at Google’s ramparts. Yahoo is leading the assault. In February, the portal giant fired up a new search engine that analysts say nearly matches Google’s performance. More worrisome, Yahoo CEO Terry S. Semel is driving Yahoo to the next frontier, customized search. Instead of today’s one-size-fits-all searches, he wants to offer queries tailored for an individual’s tastes, interests, even location. Advertisers are ready to pay royally to reach this type of targeted audience. And Yahoo is off to a big head start in gathering the personal information necessary to deliver such customization. It has amassed 141 million customer profiles; Google next to none. “They’re quite vulnerable,” says Michael A. Cusumano, professor of management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Even if Google sidesteps that threat, it faces another, perhaps more daunting one. Microsoft is working to leverage every bit of its Windows monopoly in the effort to win the search market. Ballmer and Chairman William H. Gates III are working to embed search capabilities into nearly every aspect of future versions of the operating system. Have a question? Search the Web and the hard drive too from a Word document, an instant chat box, even an Excel spreadsheet. No need to pay a visit to a search site. If Microsoft makes good on this sweeping expansion, it could turn Googling into a quaint ramble down memory lane.

To defend its market, Google must come up with a better model, one that establishes its search engine as a central platform for computing. This pushes Google to extend from its slender specialized base and venture into many of the same broad services the giants offer. To keep the big powers from feasting on its specialty, Google must stretch and become a sprawling power of its own.

This is leading Google execs to weigh ideas that to some may seem dire in nature. For example, Jeffrey D. Ullman, a computer science professor at Stanford University and a member of Google’s four-person technology-advisory council, says he’s urged the company to acquire or team up with a Linux desktop company so Google can extend search to information stored on the computer. This means competing head-on with Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system. “If Google doesn’t reach the desktop,” cautions Ullman, “Microsoft will eventually take Google’s business, just like it took Netscape’s.” Google execs say that they’ve discussed the possibility but aren’t poised to act.

In time, search engines will feast on every bit of personal information we’re willing to share, and serve up links that fit our tastes and locales — maybe even fine-tuning them according to the time of day. It’s a market headed for dramatic growth and change. No wonder so many investors are grasping for a piece of the brand that has become synonymous with search. “Google represents the new era,” says Michael Moe, chief executive of boutique investment bank ThinkEquity Partners. But buyers beware: Google’s biggest tests are dead ahead.

A related story has an interview with co-founder Larry Page. Excerpts:

People have consistently underestimated the size and importance of search. It’s a very, very large space of technologies, usage, and information. We’ve gone from 30 million to over 3 billion documents in just a small number of years. There’s going to be a lot of commercial activity in this space, a lot of companies doing things that are going to be very valuable.

It’s something people will care deeply about, because you want to trust your sources of information. If you’re doing a medical thing, wondering what’s wrong with you, or if you’re doing a commercial transaction, you’re really going to want unbiased, objective information that’s the best you can get.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we’re a long, long ways from that.

Our mission is to organize the world’s information.

Technology for the Poor

Wired News reports from Africa:

In Africa, there is a huge demand for simple technologies that can be used by people who lack access to banks, phone lines, credit cards and computers that Westerners take for granted. Living in the only country on this continent that has a modern infrastructure — even while most of its citizens remain firmly entrenched in poverty — South African entrepreneurs are in a unique position to develop and deliver these products to Africa’s poor, says Raven Naidoo, a founder of Radian, a small technology-consulting firm.

“South Africa is a testing ground but also a huge market,” he says. “Typically in South Africa people have targeted the high end of the market, but it’s a small high end. At the lower level the return might be lower, but there’s a volume gain.”

“That market out there is two-thirds of the world’s population,” says Alan Levin, Naidoo’s business partner. “No one else is capable of seeing it the way we do, or putting solutions together the way we do.”

Whereas only 2 million Africans used cell phones in 1997, that number has exploded to 34.6 million users today, making Africa the world’s fastest-growing market for mobile communications, according to the International Telecommunications Union.

After adopting technologies to make cell phones widely affordable to South Africans, MTN and Vodacom, South Africa’s two largest cellular providers, have been rolling out networks in Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Swaziland, Rwanda and elsewhere. These networks are lifelines in places where communications technology of any kind has been scarce, and cellular providers are finding these markets unexpectedly profitable.

In South Africa, a system of prepaid calling introduced in 1996 made cell phones available to the masses, allowing low-income subscribers without bank accounts and credit histories (about half the population) to pay for air time as needed. As a result, there are now 14.4 million subscribers in South Africa out of a population of 43 million, and 80 percent of them are on this prepaid system. Providers predict that upward of 90 percent of new subscribers on the continent will go with the prepaid model.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo — a massive, war-ravaged country with almost no infrastructure and an estimated 1.6 phone lines per 1,000 people — Vodacom has installed a network of base stations powered by electric generators, and a system that connects calls via satellite.

Given the infrastructure hurdles facing much of Africa, and the mobility of the country’s populace, wireless is increasingly seen as the preferred option, says Ronald Maina, a sub-Saharan regional enterprise manager for Microsoft. Cell phones have rapidly outstripped the number of land lines on the continent, and are now increasingly becoming the platform of choice for Internet access, banking and other transactions.

Farmers use SMS to keep tabs on market prices. Taxi drivers in Mozambique keep in contact by cell phone to avoid police roadblocks. Runners in Kenya compare times via SMS, while South Africans check their bank balances the same way.

One company, Fundamo, developed a system allowing people to make payments from their mobile phones. The company first tried to sell its technology in the developed world but, given the pervasiveness of credit cards, potential clients saw little point. Instead, the system has taken off in Zambia, where the demand for a cellular banking platform is high.

Here’s how it works: To make a payment, a shopper enters information on the vendor and the transaction into a cell phone, and confirms the sale with a PIN. The system then checks that funds are available in the shopper’s bank or prepaid account, and sends a confirmation to both parties.

Levin, of Radian, says the success of Fundamo in Zambia illustrates the changing mind-set among South African tech entrepreneurs, who in the past have struggled to sell their products in saturated Western markets instead of looking to their own backyards.

“These new technologies are taking on very quickly in the developing world, and allowing for a kind of leapfrog effect,” he says. “While the First World countries are still in the credit card phase, this turns cell phone companies into banks.”

India-China: Another View

[via Reuben] The Daily Reckoning has an article by Lynn Carpenter presenting a different view of India in contrast to China (you need to scroll down on the page to read the article):

I’ve been looking at both countries, and here’s what I think. India’s not the next China. Not yet. Both countries have many risks, but China’s emergence has a momentum and key support that India’s does not.

So far, the major business model for the more highly touted Indian companies is: copy what’s done in the U.S., do it cheaper, and ship it back to us. Innovation and R&D spending are not robust. But journalists touting India seem to be unaware of a fatal flaw in that plan. Not only are the profits to be made selling cheap substitutes limited, but it’s a plan all India’s fellow emerging economies can copy. Taiwan and South Korea are already cutting into the world IT market.

I’d rather find a sound business engaged in a more sustainable market: capitalizing on the boom at home. A good example of this is Sina.com or Sohu.com, the Chinese Internet companies. Or CHINA UNICOM, the telecommunications company that is gaining subscribers at home by the millions, not to mention subscribers in nearby countries. They’re not value investments today, but they are sound businesses.

And Indian companies on these models? They’re in short supply, and overpriced, too. That’s because India’s internal progress still has far to go. India’s GDP may be rising on exports, but it is not advancing on consumer spending at home.

Quite simply…India has been on the brink of ’emerging’ and becoming a world force about 40 times in the last 20 years. OK, I exaggerate, about once every two or three years. But it never quite sticks. It’s not trustworthy yet. India has not yet gathered China’s momentum. Or, as they say these days, it hasn’t reached the tipping point.

India is still a story about billions of people hungering to advance. That’s a spurious argument. It applies to Africa as well. Wishes are not ability. What’s more, the problems facing India are just as large as, if not larger than, China’s.

China has heavily indebted banks and high unemployment in its western provinces. India has high unemployment across the country, but a much more advanced banking culture, which would seem to give it an edge in the business world. But it hasn’t worked that way.

China, as a communist country, set upon a course to educate and employ all its population. It came at too high a cost to sustain, but it left a country where everyone had a taste of success for a while and an entire generation of well-educated students.

That never happened in India. Despite progress against poverty in the 1980s, the trend began reversing again during the early ’90s, when inflation hit India. In the 1991 census, 38% of India’s population was again below the poverty line. Not only are millions of adults illiterate, but so are millions of children.

This creates a spiraling vicious cycle for India. It needs progress so that it can afford to aid its own people. But with so many of its people poor and untrainable, it is hard to make that progress. India’s largest industry is agriculture. Textiles come second. The vaunted IT sector we hear so much about is a mere 3% of the economy.

The IMF recently warned that India’s GDP growth this year is likely to be less than last year…and that it will not meet its target 8% growth rate over the next several years without major repairs to the physical and social infrastructure. It needs roads, railroads, telecommunications, training and education to proceed. It must make daunting improvements within the country – in poverty, literacy, energy and free access to improvement for citizens below its small privileged class.

But the government is strapped. Its deficit comes to 10% of the GDP (the United States’ current record deficit is roughly 5% of GDP). Its cumulative national debt equals 80% of annual GDP. But when it comes to privatization, the engine for progress and Western investment, India still has strong, powerful resistance from farmers and labor trade unions.

India’s lack of buying power at the ground level where consumers live is astounding. Partly that’s the result of its attempt to leapfrog from an agricultural economy to a service economy – a model that excludes most of the population. The true path to successful development wends its way through industrialization first. It comes with higher rates of education, literacy and health. And it comes with heightened confidence on the part of large international investors – as represented by foreign direct investment.

Until the big boys put their money down, it’s not safe for small retail investors to get in on the game. Foreign direct investment to India just barely nudged up to $6.7 billion last year. That’s about what flows to Poland or Portugal…though admittedly, it’s a great increase from the $2 billion or less of prior years.

If you’re determined to catch a mainstream trend, catch the China wave rather than India’s. As an investment, I still much prefer China. An impressive portion of China’s growth is coming from industrialization and consumer products with both domestic and international appeal.

Learning to Expect the Unexpected

Edge has a talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Black Swan:

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Black swans can have extreme effects: just a few explain almost everything, from the success of some ideas and religions to events in our personal lives. Moreover, their influence seems to have grown in the 20th century, while ordinary events the ones we study and discuss and learn about in history or from the news are becoming increasingly inconsequential.

The puzzling question is why is it that we humans don’t realize that we don’t know anything about the significant brand of randomness? Why don’t we realize that we are not that capable of predicting? Why don’t we notice the bias that causes us not to realize that we’re not learning from our experiences? Why do we still keep going as if we understand them?

Bus. Std: Constructing the Memex

My latest column from Business Standard:

In the past decade, the Internet has extended our world by making accessible a vast quantity of information that was unimaginable earlier in our lives. It started in the early days with bulletin boards and newsgroups, pooling together a collection of documents on a single server, and then the ease of hyperlinking combined with directories and search engines made the physical location of information irrelevant. If it was out there on the Internet, it could, in theory, be found.

For many of us, our first Internet website memories are probably linked to Yahoo. Navigating through its hierarchy of categories or doing a search helped us get to what we were looking for. Altavista and Excite started providing search within pages, allowing us to type a word or a phrase and know that there were tens of thousands of matching documents. Google then came along and refined the process to perfection by using its PageRank algorithm, giving us results very much relevant to what we were looking for. In effect, Google became our other memory.

In its efforts to provide uniformity and consistency, Google has become a mass-market search utility. But it is not good enough. What is missing is the context that each of us have this is embedded in the web we browse, the documents we chose to save (or email to ourselves), and the subject-matter experts we know (or would like to know).

To begin thinking more deeply about this, we need to go back in time and learn more about a person called Vannevar Bush.

According to Randall Packer and Ken Jordan [writing in their book Multimedia: From Wagner to Reality], Vannevar Bush rose to prominence during World War II as chief scientific advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and director of the governments Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb and other military technologies. His contribution to the evolution of the computer ranges far and wide: from the invention in 1930 of the Differential Analyzer, one of the first automatic electronic computers.

In 1945, Bush published a paper As We May Think, outlining a prototypical hypermedia machine. He called this mythical machine as the Memex meaning a Memory Extender.

Adam Brates wrote in his book Technomanifestos: Visions from the Information Revolutionaries: Bushs immense administrative burden the daily strain of sorting, allocating, researching, analyzing, synthesizing, crosslinking, and filing spurred his idea for an invention that would perform this work for people. Bush popularized the idea that machines could solve the problem of information overload. Bush wondered whether all the sprigs of scientific wisdom, if not somehow preserved, would fall from the tree of knowledge. Information must somehow by connected to be relevant, lest it become forgotten. Knowledge accumulated and stored in massive filing cabinets under lock and key would languish. An idea developed today might not be relevant until some point in the future. What happens, though, if it is forgotten? Application of all new knowledge would require some means of keeping it available, accessible, and relevant.

Vannevar Bush wrote in his paper: [The human mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature[Associative indexing is] the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.

Vannevar Bush wrote his memex essay in 1945 before we had the computer, Internet, Web, Yahoo and Google. Even today, we struggle with information overload. The memex could be the solution, the silver bullet . So, the challenge before us is: can we leverage all the recent developments in technology to construct the memex?

There are two interesting recent developments that need to be connected together. Search engines like Google allow us to search billions of documents in a fraction of a second, while weblogs have made publishing very simple with the result that there are millions of people writing regular journals on the Web. Both are significant in their own right, as a combination they herald something much more profound in the information space.

(This will be continued in the next FutureTech column.)