Month: December 2004

TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2004: Indian Portals

I write 500-odd words Monday-Friday as part of Tech Talk on the blog and Tech Samachar. This column completed four years in November and is still growing strong. I have plenty of topics to cover for the next year also! For the last week of this year, I decided to compile what I think are some of my best(est) writings during 2004. I have split this series into four topics covering Indian Portals, Rethinking Computing, India and Bharat, and Entrepreneurship. We begin with Indian Portals.

The content space in India continues to disappoint. A combination of lack of innovation and slow growth in the Internet user base in the country has hobbled the growth of useful content sites in India. A ray of hope going ahead: growth of broadband and cheaper access devices may change this picture in the coming year. One area where there has been increasingly rapid growth is value-added services around cellphones. Even though for now much of the money is still garnered from SMS, ringtones and games (centred around targeting youth and entertainment), the coming year should see a richer set of services as the mobile phones become faster, better and cheaper.

India.com 2.0 (Jan 2004): The digital infrastructure in India is undergoing a dramatic change, which may not be very obvious. This transformation will create opportunities for content and community portals and websites, and rekindle interest in Internet information services. But along with the change in the connectivity and access devices will also come the need for change in the content that users would like to access. In short, computing and communications technologies stand at the threshold of making the Internet a utility in India the question that needs to be discussed is: how can the portals rise to the occasion? The solution lies in taking Push, a Microcontent Client, Subscriptions, Narrowcast, Writing, Multimedia, Blogs, Contextual Ads, Social Networks, Localisation and Real-Time Updates into a common framework. Think of these as the elements that make up the New Information PlatformThere are three ideas built around the New Information Platform which can help launch the next generation of activity in the Internet space: NINE, PIN and STIM.

Rethinking Search (Jan 2004): As we look at the attributes of the Next Indian Search Engine (NISE), there are two principles from open-source software development which we should keep in mind: user customisability and distributed collaborationThe focus for NISE should be on building a search platform which can be customised and extended for users, and which thinks of not just the web browser but also the mobile devices as the primary target access method.

Thinking a New Food Portal (Sep 2004): The past few years have seen the emergence of many new technologies which promise to change the way we consume content, in much the same way as the combination of iPods and iTunes has transformed the way many consume music. Cellphones are now micro-computers with always-on connections to the Internet, broadband connections can download video clips quickly, and blogs and RSS are creating an easier way to publish and subscribe to content. So, how can all of this impact the world of Indian food portals? Lets imagine the future. What if we could getimproved search, calorie information, recipes on mobiles, videos, RSS, community, information marketplace and multiple languagesFood is a very important part of our lives. A new food site done well could be financially lucrative. The time is right for leveraging a mix of content and technology to create richer user experiences. More importantly, it would also create a platform to build other vertical sites along similar lines.

Tomorrow: Rethinking Computing

Continue reading TECH TALK: Best of Tech Talk 2004: Indian Portals

Amartya Sen on India and China

The New York Review of Books has an article by Amartya Sen: “The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history, particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history of a third of the world’s population, but also because the connections between the two countries are important for political and social issues today.”

He writes:”While India has much to learn from China about economic policy and also about health care, India’s experience with public communication and democracy could still be instructive for China…With stunning success, China has become a leader of the world economy, and from this Indialike many other countrieshas been learning a great deal, particularly in recent years. But the achievements of democratic participation in India, including Kerala, suggest that China, for its part, may also have something to learn from India. Indeed, the history of China’s attempts to overcome its insularityespecially during the second half of the first millenniumhas continuing interest and practical usefulness for the world today.”

Guru Gladwell

Fast Company calls Malcolm Gladwell (author of “The Tipping Point” and now “Blink”) as an “Accidental Guru.”

Nowhere is Gladwell’s influence being felt more than in business. Starbucks’ Howard Schultz publicly attributed his company’s success to the tipping-point phenomenon. The public- relations agency Ketchum created what it infelicitously named an “Influencer Relationship Management” database that emulates Gladwell’s model of connectors, mavens, and salesmen. One tech company even named itself TippingPoint Technologies Inc. The mere mention of his name to creative directors or product developers results in nouns not typically associated with business thinkers: He’s a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.

Now Gladwell’s back again in bound, written form, this time exploring how first impressions affect decision making. In Blink , he argues that by distilling the first few seconds in which we interact with a person, product, or idea into what is useful information and what is misleading, we can learn to make better decisions. “We talk endlessly about what it means to think about a problem, deliberative thinking and rational thinking,” he says. “But we spend very little time talking about this other kind of thinking, which is happening in a split second and which is having a huge impact on real-world situations.”

To the business world, he’s now a corporate sage, a 21st-century Peter Drucker.

The “useful” that Gladwell advocates in Blink is the idea that we can teach ourselves to sort through first impressions to “figure out which ones are important and which ones are screwing us up.” While most of us would like to think our decision making is the result of rational deliberation, he argues that most of it happens subconsciously in a split second. This process — which Gladwell dubs “rapid cognition” — is where room for both error and insight appears. Many of the snap judgments we make are based on previously formed impressions and are competing with subconscious biases such as emotions and projections. Once we become aware of this, Gladwell argues, we can learn to control rapid cognition by extracting meaning from a “thin slice” of information.

Business Week has a review of Blink.

The Game of Go

The Economist writes on what is considered the most intellectually challenging game of them all:

[Go] is a simple parlour game where two opponents, comfortably seated and often equipped with nothing more than folding paper fans and cigarettes, take turns placing little stones, some black, some white, on a flat wooden grid. Simple regarding rules and gear, that is, yet so challenging that in this mind-game, unlike chess, and despite the long-standing offer of a $1.6m reward for a winning program, no computer has yet been able to outwit a clever ten-year-old.

The game…is not just more difficult and subtle than chess. It may also be the world’s oldest surviving game of pure mental skill. Devised in China at least 2,500 years ago, it had stirred enough interest by the time of the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD) to inspire poets, philosophers and strategic theorists. One of these strategists, Huan Tan (who died in 56AD), advises in his work Xin Lun, or New Treatise, that the best approach in the game is to spread your pieces widely so as to encircle the opponent. Second best is to attack and choke off enemy formations. The worst strategy is to cling to a defence of your own territorya warning that would have benefited, say, the designers of France’s 1930s Maginot line.

China and IT Services

WSJ writes:

In India, Infosys employs tens of thousands of English-speaking employees to handle back-office software projects for U.S. clients including Citigroup Inc. and American Express Co. Now, the company wants to re-create that high-tech, low-cost model for software development in China, where many of its biggest clients are beefing up operations.

“China will be a useful source of skills for Indian companies,” says Girija Pande, a regional director for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., another Indian software company expanding in China. Tata now has more than 200 people working at three China offices and plans, like Infosys, to market services to multinational companies operating in China as well as domestic ones. “These are two countries that are going to be collaborating,” he says.

For U.S. companies still struggling to compete with cheap foreign labor in industries ranging from textiles to computers, it sounds like a double-outsourcing nightmare. But the trend toward Indian-Chinese business cooperation is likely to continue, analysts say, particularly in information-technology services where both countries have a wealth of engineers.

There are risks: The Indian companies must spend extra money to train Chinese engineers, many of whom lack strong project-management and consulting skills, including good English. But the Indian companies feel they need to be physically closer to their existing Western and Japanese clients who are now selling more products inside China. The idea is that Chinese programmers are best-suited to deal with material written in Chinese and can better customize programs for the heavily regulated Chinese market, including the accounting and billing software used by Western companies.

The Indian companies also are worried about their bottom lines: With competition for skilled programmers getting fiercer in India, and salaries soaring, the companies need new, affordable sources of labor to maintain a competitive edge over Western rivals such as IBM.

Infosys estimates that wage costs for software engineers are rising about 15% a year in India, but increasing just 4% in China. That makes China an alluring alternative to India for all types of programming, not just software built specifically for a customer’s China business.

McKinsey Quarterly asks if China’s can compete in IT Services:

To compete effectively in global outsourcing, China’s software industry must consolidate. The top ten IT-services companies have only about a 20 percent share of the market, compared with the 45 percent commanded by India’s top ten. Furthermore, China has about 8,000 software-services providers, and almost three-quarters of them have fewer than 50 employees. No company has emerged from this crowded pack; indeed, only 5 have more than 2,000 employees. India, on the other hand, has fewer than 3,000 software-services companies. Of these, at least 15 have more than 2,000 workers, and someincluding Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro Technologieshave garnered international recognition and a global clientele.

Without adequate scale, Chinese players are unlikely to attract top international clients. In general, smaller companies are riskier and less reliable partners. They are more vulnerable to the loss of key personnel, may not have the financial muscle to survive for the duration of a project, and often don’t have the capacity or breadth to absorb large projects easily.

With greater size and an improved talent base, Chinese software-services companies will be in a better position to address other issues, such as building credible brands in international markets and developing knowledge of specific industries, including finance and pharmaceuticals. Organizational and operational changes are also needed to protect the intellectual property of clients. Last, most companies will have to abandon their project-based mentality and adopt a new focus on giving clients long-term value.

On-Demand TV

Video on-demand is finally becoming a reality. First, it was TiVo which time-shifted TV. Now, telcos and cable companies are engaged in a race to provided high-speed pipes to homes. WSJ writes:

Internet technology, which has rapidly changed how many phone calls are made, is beginning to fundamentally change TV.

As big cable companies morph into providers not only of television but also of telephone and high-speed Internet services, they are setting up national fiber-optic networks capable of transmitting all three signals using Internet technology.

The new networks are expected to allow cable companies to offer features combining phone, data and television, such as flashing the phone number of a telephone caller on a TV screen when the phone rings.

The move is another sign that cable companies are shifting away from traditional scheduled programming to shows that are available whenever viewers want to watch them. The fiber-optic networks will make it possible for digital-cable subscribers to click their remotes to view tens of thousands of hours of content stored on cable company servers — the same way Internet users click on a mouse to get Web pages and other online content stored on distant servers.

By leasing raw fiber, rather than leasing wavelength on fiber as some other cable companies are doing, Comcast is giving itself maximum flexibility to design its network from the ground up. The network will use at type of Internet technology called “gigabit Ethernet” to transport television signals. “You can use your personal computer as your television set. You can use it as a telephone. You can use it as your video telephone,” says Dave Fellows, Comcast’s chief technology officer. (Comcast doesn’t at present offer videophone service.) “We’re trying to go all services, all devices, one network.”

While most operators will continue to send traditional programming this way, Comcast is planning to use its new nationwide fiber network to distribute thousands of hours of “on-demand” programming, which digital-cable subscribers can watch just as they do a video or DVD.

China’s Tech Rise

WSJ writes:

China is more advanced in the use of technology than many people know. It passed Japan this year to become the second biggest consumer of PCs after the U.S. It’s closing in on 100 million Internet users, placing it second in that area, though it still has only half as many users as the U.S. And 15 million Chinese subscribe to broadband DSL service. That’s more than in the U.S., though many Americans get their high-speed connections from a cable company.

In cellphones, China’s 250 million users far surpass those of any other country. (Official statistics claim more than 325 million subscriptions, but they overcount business travelers, who get more than one subscription to avoid high roaming fees.) What’s more, those 250 million users are still only about one-fifth of China’s population.

The second big reason to pay attention to China’s technological rise is that it’s happening faster here than it did elsewhere in Asia. The transfer of marginal businesses from the U.S. and Europe to lower-cost operators in Asia has been going on for more than a generation, starting with Japan, then South Korea and Taiwan. China’s government, companies, partners and investors learned lessons from the country’s neighbors. They’re also all moving faster because the tools of the trade — manufacturing equipment, logistics systems and the like — are all better than ever.

Dell’s Efficiency

The New York Times writes:

at a time when economists and politicians fret over the future of American manufacturing as China emerges as the workshop of the world, Dell isn’t just defying a global trend; it’s helping to set the standard. “When everybody is outsourcing – when everybody is outsourcing – Dell continues to manufacture in the United States because over two decades of fine-tuning, they’ve figured out how to do it cheaper and smarter,” said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company who has been following Dell since 1991.

Dell’s decision to expand its American manufacturing presence, however, has nothing to do with patriotism. Executives here say their decisions are based on the bottom line as well as on geography; it is simply more efficient to stamp out computer equipment closer to the customer. “The reason we continue to manufacture in the United States is that it’s the optimal place to do so, and we can do it most cost effectively,” said John Hamlin, who oversees Dell’s entire consumer line.

Technically, Dell does not take possession of a part until it is wheeled off a truck and into its factory, and yet that same part will be a component of a complete machine within a couple of hours. A minimum of inventory translates into huge savings on Dell’s books, and it also means that when the company switches, say, to standard 40-gigabyte hard drives, it doesn’t have to blow through weeks of outmoded 20-gig drives.

All of that places a huge burden on Dell’s suppliers, each of which Dell rates weekly for performance. “To many suppliers, Dell is like having Wal-Mart for a client,” said Mr. Eunice of Illuminata. “You love the volume, but not the constant grinding pressure on price, terms, conditions and timing.”

iPod Ecosystem

Barron’s writes that even as consumers buy iPod’s to stuff into Christmas stockings, there are many other companies benefiting:

About four million units, some fetching upward of $600 and holding up to 10,000 songs, are expected to sell this quarter, twice as many as in the prior three months. Indeed, iPods are driving the rapid growth in the $4.4 billion portable digital-audio market and firing up Apple’s stock, which has risen 200% this year.

Also on a tear are shares of several little-known outfits that supply components for the iPod and other portable digital audio devices, known generically as MP3 players. Among suppliers are Texas Instruments and Hitachi, though such work is a tiny part of those giants’ revenues. But the iPod is big business for smaller companies such as Synaptics, SigmaTel, PortalPlayer and Audible, whose stocks have shot up in the iPod frenzy.

Synaptics, a leader in touch-screen technology, and Audible, which provides audio content for MP3 players, look to profit long term. Semiconductor concerns SigmaTel and PortalPlayer, on the other hand, get upward of 90% of their revenue from the iPod and other MP3s, making them vulnerable as competition continues to grow.

Exploding PCs and Appliance Relationships

[via Abhijit Nandy] Steve Makofsky points to a series by Leslie Orchard on “the relationship between appliances and computers, and how homes will eventually have multiple task-specific embedded devices instead of a central computer.” Writes Leslie Orchard in one of the articles: “One thing Im really looking forward to is seeing the PC explode and turn inside out, like the Home Motor. The price of processors drops, while their power increases. So far in computing, the processor has been a pricey central resource, demanding to be shared between programs and peripherals. But soon, it wont be too far fetched to think of a processor as the least precious part. In fact, computers could get so cheap as to be given away, while well-built tools and appliancesmore than just software alonebecome the valuable thing…Theres a lot of work that would need to be done here to get the right balance between inter-appliance paranoia and end-user convenience, but I think that simpler task-focused devices isolated from each other but linked by task-centered agreements could go a long way toward killing the free-for-all playground environment spyware and virus authors have today.”