Month: March 2007

Learning from Failure

Business 2.0 writes: “From Dogster to Google, Web companies are finding that mistakes can be shortcuts to success.”

Where old-economy giants once boasted of running “zero-defects” operations, today’s successful Internet businesses embrace defects as a way to get things right. Some management consultants even advise their clients to “get good” at screwing up.

“Failure is the enemy of efficiency, but it’s the best way to learn,” says Robert E. Gunther, a business consultant for Decision Strategies International in Conshohocken, Pa. Gunther encourages clients to make “deliberate mistakes” to learn faster.

India’s Budget

The Economist writes:

Responding to the domestic pressures, Mr Chidambaram produced a budget whose central theme was curbing price rises. It also gave a much-needed boost to spending on agriculture, education and health care. The stockmarket’s first reaction was gloomy, made worse by plummeting markets around the world, and businessmen found little to cheer about. But, while defending the pursuit of growth, Mr Chidambaram was aiming at different targetsfor economic and social as well as political reasons. He increased funds for education by 34%, while money for health and family welfare went up by 22%. By comparison, spending on defence will go up just 7.8%.
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Enjoying the surge in revenues brought by rapid growth, Mr Chidambaram said that agriculture must hold the first charge on our resources. He announced plans to boost credit to farmers, as well, disappointingly, as to increase fertiliser and water subsidies, which tend to benefit the better-off, and help cripple the budget in leaner times. The Confederation of Indian Industry, a business lobby group, said more should have been done to increase private-sector investment. But Mr Chidambaram said later that agriculture had to be tackled through the millions of small farmers with less than a hectare of land rather than corporate investment. The hope is that such measures to boost agricultural supply will curb prices.

India Mobile Space

India Knowledge@Wharton has a good overview with an analysis of the Vodafone-Hutch deal:

The growth numbers explain most of the market’s fervor. India’s cell phone user population doubled during the past year to 150 million at the end of 2006. More than 6 million new subscribers are signing up for mobile services each month, making India the world’s fastest growing mobile market. Cell phones are not just a way to keep in touch with loved ones in a country that loves to talk, but in a booming economy they also become workstations for millions in India’s unorganized sectors. Vodafone’s India-born CEO Arun Sarin said in a speech in Barcelona recently that he expects the 150 million subscriber base — which represents a penetration rate of just 13% — to grow to 500 million in a few years. Much of this growth is expected to come from more than 600,000 villages where millions of Indians live. “We are really excited to move into the rural areas,” Sarin said in his speech. “Whenever we get into these rural areas, we find people love to talk. They light up our base stations immediately.”
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Ravi Bapna, professor of information systems at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, notes that Google’s co-founder and president Larry Page has said he wants cell phones to be free. Low-cost phones like Motorola’s MotoFone F3 will allow for “m-commerce” capabilities to emerge in the industry, including banking, insurance and other financial services. “What I see on the horizon is more localized search with phones that connect to GPS (satellite-based global positioning systems), so they [the service providers] know your location,” he says. “Google will tie in these things; if you type in an SMS saying you are looking for a restaurant in Brigade Road (in Bangalore’s main shopping district), it will send you the information, and maybe also give you a restaurant coupon.”

Blinkx for Video Search

The New York Times writes:

Mr. Chandratillakes solution does not reject any existing video search methods, but supplements them by transcribing the words uttered in a video, and searching them. This is an achievement: effective speech recognition is a nontrivial problem, in the language of computer scientists.

Blinkxs speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using hidden Markov models, a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known.

Mr. Chandratillake calls this method contextual search, and he says it works so well because the meanings of the sounds of speech are unclear when considered by themselves. Consider the phrase recognize speech, he wrote in an e-mail message. Its phonemes (rek-un-nise-peach) are incredibly similar to those contained in the phrase wreck a nice beach. Our systems use our knowledge of which words typically appear in which contexts and everything we know about a given clip to improve our ability to guess what each phoneme actually means.

Incubators in India

Sramana Mitra writes:

India needs Incubator Funds. 3-4-5 Partners with solid entrepreneurial experience, rolling up their sleeves, with strong ties to the valley, experience of the cultural nuances of the country, with strong understanding of product and strategic marketing, up-to-speed, current.

In some cases, these Partners would need to come up with ideas for new ventures, and recruit teams around them. Vinod Khosla used to do this at one time. This is not the job of analysts, bankers or professional fund managers.

LISTEN ALL YE VC GLITTERRATI WHO ARE ANNOUNCING BIG INDIA STRATEGIES : TAKE $25 MILLION FROM YOUR INDIA FUND, AND CREATE AN INCUBATOR WITH A GROUP OF EXPERIENCED ENTREPRENEURS, WHO CAN ACTUALLY MAKE A PIPELINE HAPPEN.

Mobile Advertising

Telecoms.com has an excerpt from a Pyramid Research report: “”When you consider that mobile is the only media platform currently lacking advertising as a revenue stream, it is clearly a very exciting greenfield opportunity for brands to get in front of a very large audience. For MNOs it is certainly a way of generating revenues and can be used as a way of augmenting mobile content to encourage uptake. Moreover, current generation handsets are more than capable of displaying advertising in a manner that is of an acceptable quality to brands and, as with internet-based advertising, [it] provides a high degree of transparency relating to return on investment. However, the potential to alienate subscribers with badly executed mobile advertising is not to be taken lightly.”

Web-based Collaboration Tools

Forbes writes about nine such tools, and adds a cautionary note: “Bear in mind before you jump in that you’re giving information to a third-party company to store. If you’re not in IT, you should talk to the IT department to be sure you’re not violating company policy by using these services. And, even if you’re in IT, before you use these services, you should talk to your company’s legal and compliance offices to be sure you’re obeying the law and regulations with regard to managing company’s information.”

GPS Handsets

WSJ writes about Nokia’s plans:

The new Nokia phones will have a global positioning system receiver, which uses satellites to determine a user’s location, speed and direction. Local maps come installed in the phones and additional maps can be downloaded from Nokia’s Web site, either directly to the phone or via a computer.

With its new phones, Nokia is trying to get the types of services that already are relatively common in Japan adopted elsewhere. It hopes that customers won’t only use maps and searches for local restaurants and hotels, which it will offer as free services for the most part, but also will pay for additional content such as city guides and the navigation service with spoken directions.

Sun at 25

InfoWorld writes:

Sun marks its 25th anniversary this week. To the outside observer, however, there may appear to be little to celebrate. Sun’s stock price languishes in the single digits, not even matching its performance of five years ago. Although the company’s product portfolio is brimming with innovative technologies, it seems unable capitalize on them. Sun stands poised at one of the most critical moments of its history, yet its ability to shape its own future seems doubtful.
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There’s no doubt that Sun has superior technology. In the real-world IT market, however, superior technology doesn’t always win out. (Some of Sun’s competitors in the Workstation Wars can testify to that.) But the other card Sun has in its hand, after all, is sheer staying power. And as it marches onward toward its thirties, let’s not think of it as a company approaching middle age. Rather, it’s simply growing into maturity. As long as it carries on the cause of open source and open standards — both in name and in spirit — there will always be a future for it in the market, no matter what its shape.

TECH TALK: 3GSM 2007: Snippets (Part 2)

Mike Rowehl: The mobile world wont end up changing the online world like I had assumed it would. It really looks like the innovation is going to flow the other way around. People who are already working in mobile have had all semblance of initiative and innovation beaten out of them. You can lay a new business model down in front of them and explain in detail how it works, and generally they arent able to grasp it unless it looks enough like something they already know. However, people coming from the online world and looking to expand into mobile generally are accustomed to a shifting environment and taking in new opportunities and integrating them into their mental framework…The stage should be set for mobile to completely subsume the online world. But instead its the people from the online world staggering out into the sun and realizing theres no one trying to grab the potential of the new medium and just picking up the pieces waiting for them.

DSP DesignLine:

Existing subscribers in developed markets don’t have compelling reasons to increase their spending. Consider the current hot technology, mobile TV. Consumer interest in this technology is lukewarm at best, so carriers can’t count on it for a revenue boost.

Thus, it’s clear that the wireless industry is now driven by cost-cutting, not by cutting-edge features. Not that tomorrow’s phones won’t be high-tech: Just look at the Chinese market, where sales of low-tech PHS phones are rapidly cooling. It won’t be long before this market is taken over by cheap 3G phones.

The moral of the story? Designers must keep pushing technology forward, but cut costs at the same time. It’s a tough challenge, but one that must be met in the new wireless world.

VNUnet.com:

Handset manufacturers, application developers and operating system managers are all planning large-scale roll outs of GPS technology this year.

The popularity of the technology has been boosted by a new generation of GPS chips that are small enough to fit into mobile handsets, along with power management technology that offers increased battery life.

“GPS is definitely one of the key themes of the 3GSM show,” said David Wood, head of Symbian.
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The main market for GPS systems is in Europe, but technologists believe that the US market will also take off in the next two years.

The Register: Fourteen mobile operators around the world have teamed up to create a standard payment system using Near Field Communications (NFC). To be called “Pay-Buy Mobile”, the standard is backed by AT&T and China Mobile, among others, and should lead to interoperability between suppliers’ equipment and financial companies.

Andrea Trasatti:

What did not surprise:
* Motorola: was it 2007? 2006? 2000? It seems like it’s still the StarTac from the Nineties. Aren’t their phones all clones of the RAZR which is a slim version of the StarTac?
* Nokia: same as above, where is the innovation?
* mobileTV was everywhere
* IMS was everywhere

What surprised me:
* SonyEricsson W880: imagine the already very good W810i, imagine it thinner, lighter, nicer, faster. If the price is reasonable, this is going to be a BIG hit. A lot of people I spoke to really liked it, it’s really good!
* LG KG800: we all know the phone, it’s not new, but the softkeys are really weird. You don’t feel when you click and you never really understand if anything is going to happen. Disappointing experience, sorry.
* mobileTV hardware vendors, integrators, solution providers were everywhere, but where is the content? Where is that thing that makes everyone want it? Where is that bit that makes it go from the current low-satisfaction state to a big service for everyone?
* Trolltech had a big booth with about 20 devices running their Linux-based Qtopia. I did not know so many devices use it.

Continue reading TECH TALK: 3GSM 2007: Snippets (Part 2)