Month: March 2007

TECH TALK: Envisioning Tomorrows World: Imagine

The big opportunities in tomorrows world lie in creating solutions to alleviate daily inconveniences in urban India and to increase incomes in rural India. The PC Internet is limited by various factors low installed base of PCs, poor broadband penetration and access that is for the majority of the audience limited to cybercafes. By contrast, a world built around teleputers, the Ubinet and the M-Web can create new opportunities.

Imagine the nearby kirana store lets call it Ajay Kirana. It can now publish regular updates on deals and even unsold perishable items. My mother may want to subscribe to Ajay Kiranas updates on her teleputer. She can then decide once she gets the update if she wants to get the bread at half-price. Or, imagine a toy company providing regular updates to new parents on what are the best toys to buy along with parenting tips. This does not have to be limited to text it can come with rich media attachments. Imagine a TV broadcaster sending out updates at 8:30 pm providing a small preview of the 9 pm soap opera my wife would love a service like that!

Small book publishers could build relationships by sending out regular updates of new books to subscribers, and even take orders and payments via the teleputer. For those who would like to listen, there could be audio serials sent out daily. Imagine getting a small abstract from religious scriptures to begin ones day.

In rural India, the teleputer can be the instrument for person-to-person classifieds. People could publish what they would like to buy or sell via their teleputer (which could either be owned by them or be shared device). Subscribers from nearby villagers could then be alerted if their needs match what has been put up.

The multimedia-rich teleputer could also be used by job seekers for creating multimedia profiles of themselves. The same idea could be applied for those seeking marriage partners. In fact, small videos could also be made of cars and apartments for sale. Subscribers could then get much more than a simple text description.

There are many such innovative ideas which can come into play once the digital infrastructure has been created. Perhaps, the biggest opportunities lie in rethinking education and healthcare around a school-in-a-box concept (as put forth by Atanu Dey) and personal healthcare records, respectively.

Tomorrow: SMEs

Continue reading TECH TALK: Envisioning Tomorrows World: Imagine

Technology Addiction

BBC News writes:

The seemingly exponential growth of portable technology has sparked fears that people are becoming addicted or swamped by gadgets and their uses.

One major consequence of this phenomenon is that the line between work and private life is much more blurred, now that e-mail and phones provide a 24-hour link between employers and staff.

Experts believe that even the decision-making process of the average person can be adversely affected.

However, others think that the bombardment of various communications can enhance the brain’s ability to process information.

Mobile Gaming

WSJ writes:

According to Juniper Research, the mobile-gaming market is likely to increase from about $3 billion today to nearly $17.6 billion by 2011. But despite that robust growth, the industry will need to overcome technical and pricing issues if it is ever to become a mass market.

“The mobile phone opens up markets that have never had a console gaming market, India and China being the two biggest prizes. So there’s a big opportunity there to target a whole new audience,” said Chris Coffman, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media. “There are plenty of risks there, too — price points for the games need to be low, and there is the danger of piracy.”

Social Networking Next Phase

The New York Times writes:

[There is] a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

The new social networking players, which include Cisco and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.

When You’re Losing a Technical Argument

[via Thejo] Pigdog Journal writes about some of the things to say:

# That won’t scale.
# That’s been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that’s O(NlogN).
# There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
# The syntax is idiosyncratic.
# Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
# That can’t be generalized to a cross-platform build.
# Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
# If we go with that idea, we’re going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
# Our support infrastructure simply can’t handle the volume that change would involve.
# I had one of the interns try that approach for another project, and it scrambled the CEO’s hard drive. So I think it’s going to be a hard sell.

$100 Laptop’s Interface

Business Week writes about Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop project:

What has not received much attention is the graphical user interfacethe software that will be the face of the machine for the millions of children who will own it. In fact, the user interface, called Sugar, may turn out to be one of the more innovative aspects of a project that has already made breakthroughs in mesh networking and battery charging since Negroponte unveiled the concept two years ago.

Sugar offers a brand new approach to computing. Ever since the first Apple Macintosh was launched in 1984, the user interfaces of personal computers have been designed based on the same visual metaphor: the desktop. Sugar tosses out all of that like so much tattered baggage. Instead, an icon representing the individual occupies the center of the screen; “zoom” out like a telephoto lens and you see the user in relation to friends, and finally to all of the people in the village who are also on the network.

TECH TALK: Envisioning Tomorrows World: The Present and Future Webs

Today’s Web can be thought up as a Reference Web. It is like a gigantic library with almost all of the information that we need available at a click of a button. The M-Web will be the Incremental Web, focused on all that’s new. It will be more focused on real-time information streams. These will start becoming important because our teleputer will be a two-way device, capable of sensing and responding, transmitting and receiving.

Much of today’s Web is text-centric. The M-Web will be rich media. The teleputers, much like today’s mid- to high-end phones, are multimedia devices. With the Ubinet, it will become much easier (and cheaper) to send and receive rich media.

The other shift can be thought of as being from W3 to N3. The W3 can be thought of as the world, wide and wild Web. The N3 can be thought of as now, near and new Web. What’s happening around us and in real-time will be mirrored on the teleputer.

Search is the de facto way to navigate today’s Web. The M-Web will be built around Subscriptions. Think of subscriptions as building ongoing relationships with entities. Because there is a device with us all the time, we can now get access to events as they happen.

Advertising is the monetary driver for Search. Similarly, Invertising will be the key driver around Subscriptions. Invertising think of it as invited advertising — is about building a hotline to customers.

India has the ability to lead in the creation of this new world because for most of us, mobiles have become the primary device in our life. Tomorrow’s world will be built around future generations of mobiles.

Tomorrow: Imagine

Continue reading TECH TALK: Envisioning Tomorrows World: The Present and Future Webs

Snack Culture

Wired writes:

Music, television, games, movies, fashion: We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips – in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture – and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).
…
Today, media snacking is a way of life. In the morning, we check news and tap out emails on our laptops. At work, we graze all day on videos and blogs. Back home, the giant HDTV is for 10-course feasting – say, an entire season of 24. In between are the morsels that fill those whenever minutes, as your mobile phone carrier calls them: a 30-second game on your Nintendo DS, a 60-second webisode on your cell, a three-minute podcast on your MP3 player.

Mobile Platform

C. Enrique Ortiz writes:

* The Future of Mobile Applications is Multiplatform, Multimodal
* The Future of Mobile Applications is Multimodal, Context-aware and Social
* The Future of Mobile Applications is exposing and consuming Services on the Web – The Web as the Platform
* The Future of Mobile Applications is an Iceberg
* The Future of Mobile Applications is Open, Public, Connected and Useful

My view on the future of the Mobile applications is also about applications as platforms on the web exposing services to mobile clients to that are very good on the client side, while pushing (leveraging) services on the Web, but as we move forward, we are also talking about multiplatform/multimodal mobile applications (and services on the Web), where the mobile context as a whole is taken into account. Again, how these are exposed and consume will all depend on the target audience.

Ning 2.0

TechCrunch reviews the new release: “Ning can be used to create a fully functional and customized social network in minutes (click on image to right for larger view)…The first step after naming and describing the new application is drag and drop desired modules- such as text boxes, RSS feeds photos, forums, blogs and videos – into the application in the area you want them. Adding the members module, for example, shows a list of the networks most popular members within that module.”